had been expecting her daily in the rue Chantereine. On arrival in the
French capital, he made a point of meeting Talleyrand as his very first
item of business. In the early days the entente between Bonaparte and
Talleyrand was a true meeting of minds, and their first encounter, in the
Grand Salon of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was marred only by the
presence of the pushy Germaine de Stad. Napoleon cut her and
concentrated instead on Talleyrand's other guest, the celebrated Pacific
navigator Admiral de Bougainville, the man whose reports from Tahiti in
I767 had done most to boost the cult of the 'noble savage'. Only after a
long consultation did Napoleon and Talleyrand go on to the Directory to
meet his five nominal overlords. There he was received warmly by Barras
and La Revelliere, more coolly but still amicably by Reubell but in frozen
silence by the two new men, Merlin and Franc;ois de Neufchateau.
Napoleon was now the focus for hysterical hero-worship as the ideal
citizen-soldier, a kind of melange of George Washington and Cincinna tus.
While he pondered his next move, Napoleon cultivated the image of a
demi-god, above the small change of quotidian politics, linked to no faction
or party. At a dinner party on I I December he was in sparkling polymath
form, discussing metaphysics with Sieyes, poetry with Marie-Joseph
Chenier and mathematics with his old teacher Laplace. But the more he
remained above the melee, the more intense was the desire of Parisians to
catch a glimpse of him. The entrances to his house in the rue Chantereine
were sealed off with judiciously placed porters' lodges. Inside his fortress
Napoleon seethed at Josephine's absence and at the bills presented by the
decorator and cabinetmaker George Jacob for refurbishments done at
Josephine's request. Even on St Helena he bridled at the bill from Jacob of
IJO,ooo francs for custom-built salon furniture alone.
After enjoying a quasi-Roman triumph in the Luxembourg, where he
was introduced by Talleyrand to cheering crowds and made a short non
committal speech in response to Barras's exhortation to him to lead his
legions across the Channel, Napoleon got down to the serious business of
planning the invasion of England. Much had happened on this front since
his departure for Italy. In December I796 an invasion force under Hoche,
IS,ooo strong in forty-five ships, and carrying Wolfe Tone the Irish
revolutionary leader, set out for Bantry Bay. The fleet evaded the Royal
Navy and reached landfall, all bar the frigate carrying Hoche himself.
The army commander General Grouchy (later to be Napoleon's nemesis)
took the fateful decision not to disembark his forces until Hoche arrived.
After lying indolently at anchor for three days, the invasion fleet was hit
by a severe storm which sent them scuttling back to France. Two months
later, in Wales, Hoche tried again, this time sending an army of convicts
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