NAPOLEON’S
BEEKEEPER
JOSÉ LUIS DE JUAN
NAPOLEON’S
BEEKEEPER
Translated by Elizabeth Bryer
Published in 2020
from the Writing and Society Research Centre
at Western Sydney University by the Giramondo Publishing Company
PO Box 752
Artarmon NSW 1570 Australia
www.giramondopublishing.com
First published in Spain
under the title El apicultor de Bonaparte
by editorial minúscula 2017
Copyright © José Luis de Juan 2017
Translation copyright © Elizabeth Bryer 2020
Designed by Harry Williamson and Jenny Grigg
Typeset by Andrew Davies
in 11.25/15 pt Garamond 3
Cover design by Jenny Grigg
Printed and bound by Ligare Book Printers
Distributed in Australia by NewSouth Books
A catalogue record for this
book is available from the
National Library of Australia
ISBN: 978-1-925818-23-9 (pbk)
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9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my father
The bees on the imperial mantle are as mysterious to me as they must have been for Childeric and for Napoleon himself, as perfectly difficult to understand as the questions put to Solomon or the parables of the Gospel. All that remains is to wait, with the certainty that one day we shall know what they meant for the fate of the great Emperor and for our old world, which does not cease to fall further into darkness ever since he vanished.
Léon Bloy
In the story of N., the same thing happens as with the Book of Revelation: we all feel that there should be something more, but we are unsure what.
Goethe
1.
Dear Andrea,
Bonaparte abdicated yesterday in Fontainebleau. With his back to the wall, he still intended to take his twenty thousand soldiers, having ruled out the others he had summoned from Italy, and march on Paris where he would meet with certain defeat. His generals made him see sense in the numbers, especially MacDonald: up against half a million men.
But the important thing now is that he has accepted Elba in exchange for everything else, excepting the title of emperor (Emperor of Elba!), which he may continue to use. He will arrive on the island before this letter, which will reach you in a week at most as I’m giving it to Vittorini, who is departing for Livorno today.
Who would have thought it! After dedicating all these years to following his every move with utter devotion, now we shall have him within reach. By this I mean you and the rest of our comrades, for I am a little far away right now. I don’t think Bonaparte will last long in Elba. Few think that the Corsican’s ambitions to serve the world have been extinguished. How can a forty-four-year-old man who held Europe in checkmate for more than a decade accept final defeat? This is a tactical withdrawal, most likely. He had no other alternative. And Elba, as you might imagine, was the lesser of two evils.
According to Duvadier, there was talk of Saint Helena and North America, of removing him once and for all from the scene of his victories, from his limitless homeland.
Certainly, on your island he will be watched very closely: who visits him, how he is informed, what his movements are. But if we play our cards right, he could be in Italy in a few short hours captaining an insurrection, or he could be disembarking in the port of Nice or Cannes after a surprise voyage. His stay in Elba won’t last long, I’m sure of that. We must act prudently but with haste.
I trust I shall see you in Pisa next month. By then no doubt you will have the information we need to devise a feasible plan.
Anselmo
P.S. Don’t neglect to bring me some of your lavender honey, these colds are killing me.
2.
The mist that usually shrouds the contours of Monte Argentario has dissipated. The line of the mainland is crisp, trimmed by a fine white cord. Castiglione is a small patch of white that contains all memory of Castiglione.
It’s Sunday. Bonaparte battles the heat of August by working. On his feet, poring over a map of the island, he traces lines freehand between compasses, rulers and pencils. Here and there he scrawls notes in a cramped cursive, inclined to the right. Yesterday he decided to conduct a thorough inspection of the island’s beehives, starting with the largest honeybee farm. Or so he told Méneval, even though he’d in fact made the decision weeks before. He knows that only frenetic activity, the purest defence against the slow creep of tedium, can keep him alive in Elba.
He hasn’t allowed himself even a single day to lick the insidious wounds of pride. He could have dwelled on his enemies’ slights. He could have dedicated entire days to classifying hate, to plotting revenge. Was he not forced to disguise himself as an overseer and share the box seat with the coachman to evade being stoned by a mob at a crossroads in Provence? Was he not made to forfeit his power over one-and-a-half continents just to rule a small isle stranded off the coast of Tuscany?
They may expect him to rot on the beaches of Elba, a castaway from the sinking ship of his empire, but he refuses to give them the satisfaction. He is not some Robinson Crusoe on a desert island, stopped short at the sight of human footprints in the mud. Nevertheless, he confronts his solitude on the island with the same calculating, practical frame of mind as Crusoe, as if he expects to spend the rest of his life there. He even wishes to mix with the island’s inhabitants.
In the afternoon he doesn’t play cards with the ladies. The exact whereabouts of the apiaries on the map occupies him for a large part of the day. Feigning illness, he avoids the forced cheerfulness of the Palazzina dei Mulini. In the heat of August, his court starts to seem more grotesque than usual. He takes a light dinner, like always, drinks two glasses of the country’s ashen wine and, after dealing with several household matters with meticulous impatience, returns to his quarters.
The last of the twilight rays enter through the anteroom’s window. He is sweating from his forehead. The breeze has gone. He looks to the sea, which is growing choppy towards Corsica.
A servant announces his arrival through a side door disguised in the indigo wallpaper. He helps Bonaparte remove his boots, unbutton his green frockcoat. The Emperor hands him his gleaming dress sword and goes to splash water on his face at a porcelain washbasin. Drying himself, in his shirt, he returns to the English desk where three newly arrived books await him, as well as a stack of documents, letters, memoranda. Setting aside the volumes, he energetically gathers everything else and banishes it to the back of a drawer. He sits, taking up the first book, Vie des abeilles africaines, by Gaston de Fresnais. He looks over the discursive index, pausing at the seventh chapter.
‘Drone killing – Beehive reorganisation – Princess system – Queen delivery – Queen succession – Returning to work.’
He searches for page 137. He reads for an hour without shifting position or looking up.
The whine of the mosquitoes heralds nightfall. They encircle the Emperor, trace loops and lines in the room but don’t touch him. They mustn’t like his blood, mosquitoes have never bitten him. Nor have bees.
The full moon appears.
Bonaparte thinks about night-time in Ajaccio. Not a particular Ajaccio night, but the celestial light and the sounds at daybreak. He thinks that all his nights – in Paris, in
the palaces of Milan, Vienna and Berlin, as well as the many nights spent in battle, when he crafted victories to the beat of insomnia – that all of these pale in comparison to his Corsican nights, to those premonitions hidden in the shadows. As for these summer days in Elba, is it not the case that they contain some of the mystery of those sweltering days of childhood, when everyone was taking a nap or else pretending to do so as they fornicated in the haystacks? On those days he stationed himself behind the myrtle thickets and was intoxicated by the roses and daisies and gentian violets while he waited for the bees to cease their buzzing and collect the nectar, a moment he seized upon to trap them in his tulle net and stick them into glass jars where they perished, stunned to realise they would never make it back to the hive.
Ajaccio days and Ajaccio nights. But everything else happened too. No, he, Bonaparte, shall not surrender to the madness to which some think he has been condemned. The goddess Fortuna is still saving good cards for him. He imagines himself a bee breaking loose from the tulle and disappearing towards the sun as if it were never trapped in the first place.
He dips into the second book, Manuel de l’Apiculteur à la Campagne. It has just arrived from the Dechambres printers, it still smells like ink. Beautiful engravings. A surprising beehive interior in all its detail, as if sliced in half lengthways. How did they do it? And those new copper-wire masks, so practical and safe.
He’s not satisfied with the way the beehives – little wooden houses like unadorned cuckoo clocks – are arranged in a flattened pyramid configuration, with each new line including an extra hive, as etching 35 illustrates (La disposition pyramidale). He prefers the traditional semicircular design, for in his opinion it economises time and space, allowing the beekeeper to collect the frames of crystallised honey in a clockwise motion, rather than in an uncomfortable zigzag, which runs the risk of causing the beekeeper to knock over the hives.
He lingers over the final pages, which summarise recent research on the bees’ sense of direction. A naturalist from Rouen moved a swarm from one honeybee farm to another, three leagues distant, which itself had hundreds of hives. Forty-eight hours after releasing them at the second farm, he confirmed that at least seventy per cent of the worker bees, painted carmine for identification purposes, had returned to their apiary of origin. And they were laden with pollen, as they had been unable to resist the call of the flowery fields in their path.
In sum, it is a decent beekeeper manual that he will return to at a later date.
Bonaparte yawns. The third book – Bees in the Ancient World: Roman Epigrams about Bees – remains unopened on his small English desk.
3.
The previous afternoon, Saturday, a footman appears on Andrea Pasolini’s doorstep to announce that the Emperor will visit him at half-past six on Monday morning, and that he expects to tour Elba’s hives in his company.
‘Who is this Pasolini, Your Excellency?’ Méneval dared ask the first time he heard the beekeeper’s name.
Bonaparte responded that he was hoping he would tell him.
And so, the following is what the Emperor of Elba discovered about the beekeeper, thanks to reports from the spies deployed discreetly across the island, summarised by Méneval in his characteristically precise and sometimes florid style.
Descended from Maremma peasants who fled the fevers and settled on the island more than a century ago, Pasolini took over the honeybee farm established by his father. He was unable to avoid that birthright. While at first he alternated the collection of honey with other rural activities, now the beehives take up almost all his time. Elba’s honey started to gain renown around 1750, when a doctor from Grosseto attributed to it curative properties. The collection of honey turned into a decent livelihood. Better than mining, wine growing or legume growing – the island’s other secular activities – and certainly less tiring than fishing. Thanks to the honey they exported to the peninsula, the family prospered in ways hitherto undreamed of. The father bought neighbouring fields and expanded the business, and he could have monopolised Elba’s honey if paralysis hadn’t left him prostrate and taken him to the grave two years later.
Pasolini’s fate was bound to the bees. In between two sisters, he was an observant and quiet child who always seemed to be elsewhere. His curiosity to discover what was behind the apiary’s buzzing soon waned. On the other hand, he was fascinated by the priest’s lessons, the stories he told, the strange words he sometimes pronounced. When Pasolini was twelve years of age, Father Anselmo saw the brilliance of a rare intelligence in the child’s restless eyes and took him on as a pupil. Who knows where he might have ended up if his father’s death hadn’t forced him to submit to his lot as a beekeeper.
Those seven years under Anselmo’s guidance were fruitful. The priest taught him Latin and Greek. He learned to write in French, a language that back then was considered more cultivated than Italian, which was spoken with a Tuscan accent on the island. Anselmo was no ordinary priest. His lessons would have scandalised any provincial chaplain.
Just like our Emperor, the priest was in exile on Elba, as his zeal for his thinking and acting had led to his removal from the Siena diocese. With Father Anselmo, Pasolini would get a taste for the classics of Rome and Athens. He read Apuleius, Plato, Terence and Aristotle. He was dazzled by Voltaire and Diderot; he capitulated to the nimble discourse of Montaigne and the liberating ideas of Rousseau; he was moved by the cautious rapture of Pascal. His readings were voracious, his enthusiasms febrile.
At eighteen years of age one of Pasolini’s greatest pleasures was to escape from the farm for the entire day with a bundle of books on his back. He set out for the highest point on the island, Mount Capanne, and spent hours reading, back pressed to a trunk covered in ants. Sometimes night fell, and he had to sleep in a cave. He returned from these excursions with a lost look in his eyes, as well as a facial tic, his lips seemingly unable to avoid murmuring French and Latin phrases.
The report ends with statistics detailing Pasolini’s honey production compared to that of his competitors on the island.
But what Bonaparte doesn’t know is that back when the bees were keeping Pasolini’s father busy and Pasolini’s time was dedicated to his studies, the present beekeeper had started to write. At first, he copied paragraphs from books, then he started copying paragraphs from memory, changing the wording and providing his own examples until he developed a delirious and lively style of his own. When he was approaching twenty-three, overwhelmed by the new obligations that had fallen on his shoulders, and finding himself with little time to spare during the day, he devoted his evenings to epigrammatic writing reminiscent of La Rochefoucauld’s. His style was still direct and modern and not given to rhetoric, which was particularly meritorious when you bear in mind that his education had come from the pulpit.
Pasolini wrote about what happened to him and what he felt, but also about what happened to others and what he imagined they felt: he believed that his own life in the world was made manifest only when mirrored in their image. In time, his succinct observations of what happened to others gave way to succinct observations of what happened to his bees. The bees and their busy colonies co-opted his aphoristic fervour, until they came to occupy a central place in his writing.
If we flip through Pasolini’s notebooks from 1790 and compare these to his notebooks from 1805, for example, we can see that the writing, in the first case verbose and passionate, gradually loses its ballast: the words become shorter, phrases tend towards brevity. Sometimes – particularly in the notebooks after 1812 – entire pages are filled with enigmatic phrases without an obvious subject, like the following:
They come and go, refusing the omnipresent horror
In timeless moments they forget piety
Taken as unique and immortal
Pleasure pains them
They overreact
Collect
4.
While Andrea Pasolini is something of a loner, he strives not to encourage
a reputation for being strange, which would draw attention to himself.
At pains to pass unnoticed, he has always done what has been expected of him; in other words, the bare minimum expected of him. He married and had children. He kept the inherited farm running, without any ambition leading him to make improvements. He harvests honey with weary and sceptical dedication, mindful of vital changes but without any entrepreneurial flair. While others look to expand markets and offer new products, he holds fast to his father’s methods, less out of tradition than apathy. The entrepreneurial flair that certain beekeepers possess seems to him vulgar and pointless. For several years he’s had a mistress in Grosseto, a city where business dealings take him at least once a month, and where a bookseller provisions him with his true sustenance.
Pasolini reads and writes by night. He keeps his volumes and notebooks in a part of the cellar to which only he holds the key. Over the years he has excavated it to make room for new books and pamphlets. No one knows about his concealed library.
Some might say his obsession with hiding is a little extravagant. If his wife comes across him reading with his nose pressed to a candle in the dead of night, he says he is wakeful and has opened the Psalms at random to bring on sleep. Inside his house, nothing gives him away. The items on show could be found in any Elba home, except for the few Latin volumes entrusted to him by his mentor the priest before he left the island, which line a shelf in the bedchamber.
The beekeeper speaks infrequently. His wife complains of having to drag the words out of him. In contrast, in his youth he had spoken expansively with his teacher and picked up a few of his turns of phrase and a certain cadence that falls somewhere between persuasion and admonition. On his excursions to the peak of Mount Capanne he took a liking to reading aloud and memorising his favourite verses. That’s why he says only the bare minimum and rarely finishes his sentences: there comes a point at which he tires of them, as if suddenly he realises that they don’t make sense. On occasion his voice has a hollow resonance, like the chatter of a ventriloquist.
Napoleon's Beekeeper Page 1
