Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

At last it was Fanny Bertrand’s turn to seek the services of her maid and of the chamber-pot – the impact of the tea, which we Englishwomen had, almost without being told, learned how to cover up, to wait to relieve ourselves until guests had left. But the French were franker in their needs.

  Abruptly I said to Madame de Montholon in French, with a sudden onset of adolescent madness, ‘Countess, Madame Bertrand told us how you met your husband, the count. It was fascinating. Very dramatic. Like a novel.’

  She thanked me with no trace of doubt on her face, and began to supply us therefore with information about Fanny. Did we know, she asked, that Fanny was the daughter of a Creole mother? Hence the relationship to the Empress Josephine. So, the implication was, not French at all, but Irish-Creole.

  ‘The dark eyes,’ said Jane, thoroughly delighted now that I had instigated this further stream of what passed by English standards for a gush of scandal.

  ‘Fanny frequently spoke to her cousin Josephine about her own difficulties in finding a husband,’ Albine smoothly told us. ‘And the Emperor heard and mentioned his chief of the engineering staff was a single man.’ Again, the benignity of her sweet plump oval face remained unaltered as she continued. ‘They were a perfect couple, since the Comte de Bertrand was not greatly sought after by women, and Fanny, quite handsome in her way, was yet somewhat intimidating to many men. After some resistance from dear Fanny, it became a perfect marriage, and they are a great succour to each other.’

  All this was said with such an air of subtle condescension and a gleeful, unimpeachable contempt that even Fanny Bertrand herself, had she been present, would have found it hard to complain.

  Fanny Bertrand now returned, a galleon in the doorway. She knew of course she had been spoken of, and my mother managed to say we had been talking of what a splendid mother she was to her boys, and Fanny pretended to believe it. That was the thing about both of them: acceptance. It satisfied them so well.

  After they engaged in plentiful kissing of our cheeks, they went companionably to the barouche and were driven away, back towards the rock cleft of Jamestown and the Porteous house.

  My mother said to us, ‘Do not forget that though they might be worldly, they are both very brave.’

  Walking in the hinterland …

  Bertrand and de Montholon would come up from town to visit the Emperor, and when they did Gourgaud loomed jealously about the door of the marquee or the Pavilion or the gate of the grape arbour at the side of the garden. He wanted to be a high counsellor. He seemed visibly anxious that he was not. It was at his urging that Marchand the butler or one of the other servants had dug in the floor of the marquee the outline of a large crown, so that anyone who entered under that canvas roof had to cross it and could not avoid acknowledging majesty. The admiral seemed to tolerate this as a fairly innocent assertion of vanished power.

  On days when Gourgaud’s spirits about being supernumerary to the governance of the Pavilion improved, he asked Jane and me to go walking or riding with him in the hinterland. He liked striking towards High Knoll, marked out by the semaphore station on its summit and set to the South American side. That country was designed for an invigorating ramble, up the slopes of a great cup of rock the waterfall had cut in the base of the mountain.

  Gourgaud always seemed socially clumsy with us. He would greet us and compliment us on our dresses but without actually seeing them. His compliments came in little spurts like lines remembered by a bad actor, in jumbled and inept order. ‘Mademoiselle Jeanne,’ he would tell Jane, ‘your handsome neck maintains, in this climate, the complexion of a lily.’ And then, ‘Let me tell you about the fever hospitals in Pomerania, and the quarrels between the surgeons on the two chief methods of treatment.’ Without easing us towards the idea, we would hear how dysentery had pervaded the Emperor’s army even before it entered Russia, and while it was recovering from the previous winter in East Prussia and the Duchy of Warsaw. And then, camp fever!

  He had, in a different sense than the one in which the Ogre managed it, become a military child, as Emmanuel Las Cases was a secular one. All with him was therefore a strange, distracted intensity. He had no sense that we might not want to be entertained with fever wards, and it is therefore just as well that I was fascinated by such details.

  On the march into Russia, it seemed Gourgaud was in charge of the ordnance and had had to manage the conveyance of cannonballs and muskets to the front. Noble horses broke their hearts hauling cannon through Lithuania, he assured us, and he told us solemnly he numbered the conscripted farm horses of Pomerania and East Prussia amongst the heroes of France.

  My sister Jane would tell me she was touched by this noble feeling of his, as if it had not been the sacrifice of involuntary horseflesh on Gourgaud’s and the Emperor’s altar, and as if Gourgaud had expended his own heart as well. And though I was convinced like my father that the Emperor somehow deserved an altar, I was not so sure that Gourgaud deserved the one Jane seemed willing to create for him. Nonetheless, as we strolled through the island’s verdant belt and into its more arid regions of spiky plants, he strewed the strange bouquet of the Russian campaign at Jane’s feet. I say ‘at her feet’ because he would bend forward continuously, his hands open, as if laying the facts down for her, and even me, to tread on. He progressed in this flattering manner to tell us of the wounded at Borodino, who lay for five days untended and who carved meat out of the corpses of fallen chargers. He declared that the town of Mozhaisk became so foul with the Grand Armée’s dead that the capture of Moscow grew to be a medical necessity, the army needing to escape the putrefaction of its own advance.

  To give him credit, he did not try to woo Jane with anecdotes of his own valour or suffering. The army and he seemed to share the same mind. Though the quartermasters failed, he had, it seemed, nourished the army with his supply of cannonballs. This gave him strange conviction as, in the ferny though scree-strewn foothills of Diana’s Peak, he told us how the cold had set in on the great retreat, and how this or that man had suddenly staggered about as if he were drunk, and his face had grown swollen and red just like that of a drunk, but only because all the blood had fled there, into the head, the central citadel, abandoning other parts of the body. The stricken soldier could no longer hold his musket but let it fall from benumbed fingers. Unable to feel his feet, he dropped to his knees, and when he wept, tears of blood came from his eyes. Gourgaud’s voice broke at this point. He suddenly became august.

  ‘It was a beautiful army,’ he said. ‘Sons begotten from Europe’s seed! Some of them had fortunately plundered women’s clothes from Moscow and were now, in the great cold, saved by these layers of warmth. And some had stolen shoes, even from the servants’ quarters of houses, and were spared from the freezing of the extremities which brought men down into the snow.’

  I could see that Jane was horrified and enchanted. It was strange to observe one’s sister, for the first time, become subject to that sort of attachment, one different from friendship, one aimed at other indefinite and portentous outcomes. ‘The Emperor,’ he told us more than once, with a conviction that enchanted Jane, ‘was maligned. Some asked why he allowed foreigners remaining in Moscow to follow us out in our retreat, and why he let them pile our wagons high: even some English with us, certainly Germans, Swedes and Poles, carried on wagons all their earthly goods, from pianos to bookcases laden with classic authors in vellum. But you see the wisdom of that. He knew that the weather would make them lighten the load as the season advanced, until the goods on each wagon were used to make fires and the wagons themselves were entirely returned to the accommodation of our wounded and sick. He always knew, you see, what he was about. Even in ill fortune he had a plan. He sees ahead of us – he leaps ahead of the path we ordinary people can see, to the path only he can see.’

  Something in Gourgaud’s flatulence riled me, given that I had not finally decided to welcome the Ogre, or in what sense to welcome him. I interrupted his gush by asking, ‘Can any man have a
s much foresight as you say the Emperor has? If he’s so clever, why didn’t he go into Russia earlier in the year? Or not at all?’

  The painful adoration in his eyes dimmed as he turned them with a frown – with disbelief, in fact – on me.

  ‘Our army was delayed by an outbreak of spring fever, and these things are not organised overnight, young Miss Balcombe. Our first troops entered Russia in late June. No one could have guessed that was too late a date.’

  ‘If I’d been in command,’ I said, ‘I would have made sure I was ready two months before. He must have had very bad quartermasters and surgeons to be held up so long.’

  Gourgaud looked up at Diana’s Peak to the south and his eyes were slits.

  ‘It is easy to be wise on St Helena,’ he said. ‘But I can say that for good reason the ordnance had been ready to move in April!’

  I almost hoped I had made him fall out of love with Jane, just by marring his story, his Genesis and Exodus. Jane did not want him distracted, however.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘We live such restricted lives. Tell us more about the sad retreat.’

  She too frowned at me, the usual Balcombe complaint in her eyes. Why are you such an awkward and contrarian child?

  ‘Oh, the most sad, dear Miss Balcombe,’ said Gaspard Gourgard, returning to his text, ‘the most sad was when we passed back through Borodino again, where the battle had been, and we were nearly grateful to the wolves for devouring the unburied and for doing the service we had had no time for. By now the horses of the cavalry had either been eaten or sequestered by myself to haul the guns. And in even greater numbers men would fall to their knees in snow and remain there for a long time as if pondering, trying to decide whether to rise again. But I never observed a case where they managed it. As if they were campaigning in Egypt, some took their uniforms off. Boys came to resemble eighty-year-old cretins, but sometimes as they shed their clothing it was snatched up by those who needed it. How relentless the Cossacks and Russian peasants were! Hacking with sabres and billhooks at the solid bodies of frozen soldiers, and so infused with demonic hate that our deaths were not enough for them! Oh no, these barbarians wanted to penetrate our outer layers and discover the soft organs and let blood flow from them and freeze into huge clots of ice they would raise and bite into.’

  By now I knew that at base I was as fascinated by this horror as Jane.

  ‘And you, General,’ asked Jane, ‘how did you live through that terrible cold?’

  Gourgaud pulled his chin in to consider this before the tribunal of his own military conscience.

  ‘I was fortunate, mademoiselle, that I had a specific task of saving the ordnance. Unlike the infantry I had a carriage and travelled close behind the Emperor’s coach. I would fill it with suffering artillerers, but most died there, on my seats, for it was cold enough even within the conveyance. I would say that hundreds of men were hauled into my coach as a mercy, and when one died, another from the roads was dragged aboard at my order. When we reached the Berezina River the Emperor asked me to stay there and to see our troops across and, of course, the ordnance too. I had a purpose, you see, other than mere escape. And whenever I found sufficient horses to haul what was left of our guns, I felt warmed by a sense of triumph. Other men were not sustained in that way. Mind you, I was as mad as the rest, but my madness was salutary, you understand, and kept me breathing. Even so, while my officers were away from me one day – they had gone off to persuade the Württemberg artillery not to abandon their guns – I sat alone on a birch log surrounded by the mounds of frozen corpses and all at once had a terrible desire to sleep, to slide down the stump. I was awoken by some nearby soldiers quarrelling over the butchering of a dead horse, and struggled upright, then drank some of the sweetened brandy I always carried from my flask. Becoming upright after the snows had decided to suck you down – that was the trick.’

  Jane said, ‘We are very pleased that you rose.’

  By now he had become encased in his own memory and was distracted from Jane.

  It was in its way an astonishing story – as I had to admit at a deep level – and he recounted it well. In that quiet bowl amongst mountains, on a silken October evening, Gourgaud summoned up memory of the Russian attacks on the rear regiments, those still armed, those still subject to their officers. Gourgaud could muster only forty cannon to face the Russians’ hundred at Viasma, but the men who stood there, he said, were the cream of men, the oldest, the best, the foredoomed. Ferocious Russian peasants waited at the edge of the battle to move in and avenge themselves on the French wounded, and to chase after the Emperor who was not far ahead.

  I was characteristically awed and contemptuous as Gourgaud rounded out his tale. ‘So what is it to be?’ I asked him suddenly and with the archness of a nearly but not fully grown woman. ‘Are we to sympathise with those who just fell over, or admire the old guard who dropped over in the snow anyhow? What about those who were killed by cannonballs? Or what if they were killed by Russian peasants? Are they more heroic or less than the rest?’

  He looked at me with a kind of reproof. I was blasphemous. But that’s right, I wanted to say. Woo Jane and you’ll always face these eyes of mine! I would not believe, as did he, that it was all somehow of the same cloth, that the Ogre’s destroyed army was one thing. I believe that each category of misery must be weighed in its own right and – like all great sins – independently repented of and regretted and weighed. To Gourgaud, there was no coming judgement, neither of himself nor the Emperor. But if the Emperor was to be praised for being in close touch with the rearguard, why was he not at the same time to be blamed for the rest? I knew that Gourgaud would not understand. He had been a soldier since an age younger than mine and his whole mind had been the function of soldiering. It had all been one thing there, one glory and one tragedy, but the tragedy served the glory and was its own justification.

  ‘The Emperor was in no way to blame,’ he explained in a calm, ferocious voice. ‘How could you say he was, Miss Balcombe? You have met him. You have dined with him. You have seen his humanity.’

  He had by now left Jane’s side to surge forward and rein his horse in directly in my path.

  ‘How could any of it be the Emperor’s fault?’ he challenged me. ‘Any sane nation would have made peace with us after Borodino. If anyone is to blame – anyone – it is myself. I provided summer shoes for the horses, for there was never an idea that we would return whence we came in midwinter. Will you have me shot, mademoiselle? The heavy-shod Russian horses came on through snowdrifts and across ice – do you think I did not notice that difference, while ours skidded and slipped and broke their legs? I have apologised for this to the Emperor and it is always on my mind. And yet he says to me, like an honest friend, “Gaspard, you should not have been expected to know what I did not know myself.”’

  Tears began to form in the eyes of this gallant booby, and he was more influenced by them than his anger. He had taken the crime off the Emperor’s shoulders and insisted in carrying it on his own.

  Jane hung her head, genuinely overcome by the pathos of it. ‘General Gourgaud,’ she declared, ‘I must say that our whole family is grateful to the sweetened brandy you carried, for it made possible our acquaintance with you.’

  Gourgaud swallowed. He made a polite if curt bow in my direction as well.

  I could not let it all finish in this spate of false amiability. ‘What will you do to me, sir,’ I taunted him, ‘if I exercise my freedom to blame the Emperor anyhow?’

  His answer yielded up the struggle to him, I’m afraid. For he said with some grace and composure, ‘I will lament your ignorance, mademoiselle.’

  My ungraciousness to Gourgaud, who after all had done nothing real to offend me, had an explanation, and arose from something strange that had occurred when the Emperor had come to dinner the night before. My father had asked the usual guests, the admiral, and of course the officer attached to the Emperor’s suite, Captain Poppleton, and Surgeon O’M
eara, who resided in Jamestown but came so often he was a favourite by now. The dinner had bowled along at a good pace, but in its early phases the Emperor seemed distracted. I wondered if like a reluctant student he was burdened by the great history he was writing with the help of Las Cases, under the man’s school-masterly and daily urging.

  But in any case, a Frenchman should have been interested in such a conversation as that which prevailed at table – wine. And how welcome Bordeaux and other wines were now that they could be shipped licitly across the Channel to England!

  I watched the Ogre, his hand in the sleeve of his jacket making tiny silent taps on the tablecloth as if he were memorising poetry to himself. He saw me watching him and turned to me baleful, distracted eyes, and then, over a second or two, revived from his dismal condition, gathered himself, sat up and looked at me with his usual geniality – or at least I thought so. Because the sight of me had seemed to spur and incite him, and he gazed out across the table now, and coughed and began to draw invisible diagrams on the starched tablecloth with the nail of his index finger as if to draw attention.

  ‘Madame Balcombe,’ he said. ‘Mrs Balcombe!’

  My mother raised her chin. ‘Yes?’ she asked. ‘Yes, sir.’

  Sir had by now been found to be a good compromise between the form of that address the Emperor was entitled to and that which had been imposed upon us by government.

  The Emperor growled in rawest English, ‘You are like my Josephine.’ He looked into undefined distance. ‘You are reminded me of my wife Josephine.’ Then in French he continued. ‘My poor late Josephine. At the highest of her life and beautiful.’

  Then he seemed to come to a sense that he was in company and he coughed again and said, ‘I have remarking since the day first I came. Forgive me, Balcombe and gentlemen.’

  It was the kind of flattery of uncertain currency, and no one at the table seemed to know how to broker it. The men avoided each other’s gaze.