Napoleon's Last Island

by Tom Keneally

  It was now that at The Briars our feelings against Name and Nature really began to mount. We understood nothing of his fear and his monomania. We understood that he was prepared to be inhuman and saw denial as a duty. Only at this distance of time and place time do I feel almost sorry for the anguish these possessions evoked in Name and Nature, the way they rankled and bespoke the bigger world’s unwillingness to foreswear severity against the Ogre. But Sir Thomas Reade – so I believe even now – had no inhibitions about prohibiting comforts to OGF. His was a vileness unsullied by mania and thus more to be deplored.

  At last Reade, though not known for his moderation, pointed out that the bust was made of marble through and through, there could be no secret traps to it, and that it could be safely forwarded to Longwood. The governor called on Count Bertrand and said that although the bust had come in a very suspect manner, it seemed to be no reason to separate the breathing father from the marbled child, except for one thing – that the sculptor expected £125 for it, which Sir Hudson suggested it was not worth. The statue arrived at Longwood, and the entire household gathered to see it. It was placed on the mantelpiece of Napoleon’s small and strange study, and the Emperor sat down and stared at the features for at least half an hour before he said anything.

  I would later see this bust of the young Napoleon, the King of Rome, Francis, the simulacrum of the infant Emperor himself, in OGF’s rooms, and his demeanour towards it was intense even by the standards of those times. You have to remember that in those days men dwelt upon carvings and cameos as one now dwells upon photographs, so he gazed on the statue of his son, and the lovely boy smiled back, miraculously in his own features. OGF did not have complicated features, merely complicated lines to his face, and yet the Italian sculptor had somehow managed to delineate his son in a way that flattered and delighted the father.

  The weeks Name and Nature had detained the bust, depriving OGF of the sight of his child’s countenance, made us discuss whether Lord Bathurst, had he been here on St Helena, would have been more accommodating than Sir Hudson and permitted all manner of things Sir Hudson would not. We wondered between us if this island was unable to accommodate great men, wider souls.

  Yet it was the only place I would choose to be, and from which I have ever afterwards been an exile.

  It was almost in a desire to relieve the expenses of the table at Longwood that my father would invite either the Count or Countess de Montholon or Madame and Marshal Bertrand to The Briars for dinner. He wanted to ask the Las Cases men, but I am ashamed to tell you that I had pleaded with him not to. ‘The boy hit me fair in the face here, in our own garden,’ I told my father, and I demanded that if he ever asked the Las Cases he must allow me not to attend the table. I was frightened not of the boy as an assailant though. I was frightened by his ardour, and its messiness, and by his delicate feelings that had been violated at the table in Longwood.

  I saw that Madame de Montholon was pregnant again, a tribute to de Montholon’s virility, yet she was at that same time losing weight, the column of her neck becoming stringy, and there was a gloss of fatigue on her broad forehead. I was still fascinated by her having been married three times. It was a grave and eternal matter to marry once, and since I had become aware of the bewildering news of Major Fehrzen’s supposed interest in me, I was engaged by the idea that Albine had first married an old man when she was just two years older than me – my source in these matters was as ever Madame Bertrand.

  Admiral Malcolm and his wife liked to attend when we had the French at the table. We would find that the admiral, too, had smuggled goods to Longwood from his own store at the Castle, but in the end did not permit himself to show disloyalty to Sir Hudson, the commander by land. This tiny clump of dense rock outweighed in authority, it seemed, the vastness of Admiral Malcolm’s Atlantic when it came to managing the prisoner.

  Lady Malcolm had become quieter of late, as if at the advice of her husband, uneasily caught in such a delicate position. She still came in her swathes of colour, or in exorbitant turbans of many hues which echoed her general air of jolliness and enthusiasm. But she was more subdued, and the corners of her mouth would tuck themselves away in reflectiveness. It seemed clear she did not like the over-punctilious reign of Name and Nature over the island. It oppressed her too, though she could not say so.

  The Count de Montholon, a guest at The Briars with Albine, closed his mouth firmly and made his eyes blank as Major Gorrequer arrived one evening. My father had given up attempting friendship with Name and Nature and Sir Tom, but not Gorrequer, whom he felt could be a moderate influence on his master. However, de Montholon and Bertrand considered Gorrequer more vicious than he pretended to be, a less than reluctant bearer of impositions, un finaud, as de Montholon said – a sly one. So de Montholon was not won over when Gorrequer greeted everyone with apologies and with a proper round of acknowledgements and titles, extending them even to Jane and me. Indeed Gorrequer’s tentative and regretful demeanour made us anticipate some edict he carried from Sir Hudson, and so instead of convincing us of his sympathy, by his very presence he sucked the joy out of the room and made the French anxious.

  Gorrequer observed and inquired, ‘So I believe, since I’ve seen a caravan hoisting it down to Jamestown, that the General wishes to sell his plate.’

  My father said that the Emperor considered it necessary.

  ‘And you are to be the agent for the sale of this plate?’

  My father agreed that he was honoured to be so entrusted. Gorrequer conceded, ‘The governor believes it’s within the General’s right to do so.’

  ‘Well, I should think it would be in his right,’ said my father. ‘It’s his plate.’

  Later, as Gorrequer was leaving, he buttonholed my father in the hallway.

  ‘His Excellency has ordered that these items of silver not become relics to a supposed man of destiny. I told you he has permitted the sale …’

  ‘Of course,’ said my father. ‘He must.’

  ‘The silver as silver has a value, and Sir Hudson believes it is at that value the General is entitled to sell it. But he is not entitled to sell it as mementos of his lost power, and have it reach distant places with the symbols of his past ambitions. The plate’s ornamentations lie under the same prohibition as would advertisements in newspapers for the General’s return as Emperor of France.’

  ‘Oh my heavens,’ said my father, totally undone. ‘What does he mean we should do?’

  ‘The plate is to be melted down,’ Gorrequer said. ‘That’s what His Excellency the Governor requires. Imperial insignia, whether the humble bee or the eagle or any other motifs – shields, swords – are to be removed from the plate and melted down with the rest in the Jamestown forge. The government has fixed a fair price of five shillings an ounce for the silver.’

  ‘But that’s a barbarity,’ complained my father. ‘These are fine pieces, well-wrought, work crafted from the lofty imagination of humankind.’

  Gorrequer said, ‘I know, my dear fellow. I know. But the fair price of five shillings an ounce compares well with the price of silver on the London market as quoted in the last edition of The Times to reach us.’

  My father made guttural noises. He said, ‘In that case I shall advise the Emperor to keep his plate and spite your master. And the porters can bring it all back from Jamestown again.’

  ‘Well, there you see,’ said Gorrequer, ‘it’s already settled … The governor has foreseen such an attitude on your part, which he knows does you some honour, and tells me that since the decision has been made to sell the plate, the proposed sale will stand and the purpose will not be altered.’

  There was a silence, and then my father said, ‘What sort of man bent on torment would come up with such an order as that? I mean to say, you’ve seen some of the decent fellows on this island – open-hearted fellows. Hodson, Ibbetson, Doveton … We do things honestly and face each other frankly. What in God’s name is wrong with your man?’

 
; ‘It is not within my power to speculate,’ Gorrequer said piously.

  ‘My God, Gorrequer, what sort of man is not disgraced to deliver such an order?’

  ‘I cannot say, dear Balcombe, I cannot say.’

  ‘But you were a brave fellow in Spain, used to shot and the detonations of artillery. Cannot you be brave in this matter?’

  ‘It is entirely different,’ said Gorrequer.

  My mother seemed to spend much time with Lady Name and Nature. The summonses to Plantation House were regular and my mother would say, ‘Lady Lowe needs to speak to me, and I may do some good.’ Lady Lowe had taken a liking to my mother’s company, perhaps, in contradistinction to the animosity between the husbands. This did not seem a totally strange business. They were both Englishwomen of about the same age, and of some similar experience.

  One of the matters my mother said she must take up with Name and Nature was that Madame Bertrand had written a letter to Mr Solomon, a normal letter of trade, which was intercepted on the tiers above the port and sent to Sir Hudson by his watchers. He returned it to her with a note that it had been written without his permission. He added an observation that if the restrictions imposed on the Emperor’s party seemed too hard, they could relieve themselves from them by simply leaving the island.

  Nonetheless, it was a time OGF briefly gave those who knew him a sense that his world was ample. He had the bust of his son. He had books from Lord and Lady Holland and from French friends, and even Sir Hudson’s delaying of the crates that contained them did not spoil the pleasure the prisoner of Longwood took in receiving them. Jane and I rode over to attend the happy opening of the boxes. The Emperor had dressed formally in uniform and set to opening them himself with hammer and chisel. He was ecstatic to find bound volumes of le Moniteur Universel – the paper he had founded and which still prevailed under freedom of the press – and gave up any attempt at dictation to stay up at night reading them.

  ‘What a pleasure I’ve enjoyed,’ he told us. ‘So far, only the dear French titles. For I can read forty pages of French in the time it takes me to read two of English.’

  Even the mist that blew past Longwood like squadrons of stoop-shouldered sullen horsemen, or sat down on the roof and on the lungs, did not ruin his spirit for some days.

  ‘Surgeon O’Meara is limited in his cures,’ O’Meara reported OGF as saying. ‘Le Moniteur Universel is far more accomplished in his effects.’

  Letters from France, however, soured things. They turned up by way of Sir Hudson’s office, where they had been opened and scoured, and Name and Nature had written on them his reason for delaying them – which was that before being posted from Europe they had not been passed through the office of the secretary of state in Whitehall.

  Delayed letters, and the fact they had been violated, cast the Emperor down again – my father saw it on his daily visit to Longwood. The delay in correspondence and the rats in the wainscot, raiding for crumbs in darker corners, sitting on sideboards, imitating his bicorn hat and tempting him into the absurdity of trying to don it with them still slithering from it, impinged more upon him, and the nankeen-clad walls crept in in dim alliance with them.

  We next visited OGF for his birthday on 15 August. He was forty-eight years. There was a supper of all the French, and Bertrand and de Montholon proposed toasts. The Emperor came to me, eyes gleaming, and said, ‘I went for a ride today.’

  ‘That’s good for you,’ I told him.

  ‘Do you know the valley beyond?’ He hitched his head in a southerly direction. ‘The one with the spring and all the ferns?’

  ‘Geranium Valley,’ I said.

  ‘If the Fiend has his way and I perish here,’ said the Emperor quite cheerily, ‘that is the place for burial, don’t you think? It’s the only pretty place. We could transform it from Geranium Valley into the Valley of the Tomb. And geraniums … there are worse weeds to lie amidst.’

  ‘The world will have set you free by then,’ I asserted. ‘You will lie somewhere better than that little notch.’

  He thanked me for my assurance and kissed my hand. I barely saw him for the rest of that night, though I noticed him speaking to my mother with brotherly animation.

  I was not as aware as I might have been of how the reports of events overtaking his family elevated and cast down the spirits of Our Great Friend, even as he made a little room for our visits. He felt betrayed by Marshal Murat, married to his own sister Caroline. He had elevated the couple to the stature of king and queen of Naples, and Caroline had sought to retain that stature by renouncing Napoleon. It had been a comfort to OGF that Madame Mère, his mother, a shadowy goddess to us, had denounced her daughter. He was nonetheless upset that Murat had been executed by firing squad by the restored French monarchy. Yet all we heard of his distress was what O’Meara told my father during a drinking session. Apparently OGF considered the execution (an echo, I felt, of the fabled d’Enghien’s) an infraction of the rules of public decorum: a king (the talentless French restored king) had caused another king, acknowledged by all the others, to be shot. But through pure graciousness, he did not impose grief about the collapse of his great world upon us in his shrunken one.

  When we were leaving Longwood I saw the young Las Cases amongst the barren trees in the garden, striking the trunks idly with a dropped branch, uttering an occasional word to himself. All around him the French house mourned – doubly because of Murat’s double-dealing, a man lost by both betrayal and death. And there had been a terrible pathos in his brave cry at the end, facing his firing squad clear-eyed and calling, ‘Straight to the heart but spare the face. Fire!’

  I was consumed by thoughts of Murat. What impact must his fate have had on Emmanuel, whose hair had no doubt been ruffled by that cavalry man and king? And then what acid from Vienna splashed down on him from the treaty signed by grand men in that city, men whom the Emperor had once dominated? And what reflected vitriol came down to him from the intention of the Minister of State for England, the dreaded Castlereagh, to declare OGF not a fallen Emperor but a usurper?

  Emmanuel saw me and stopped and tried to direct his gaze at me. But he did not quite have the spirit for it today and hung his head. I saw Gourgaud emerge from the side door of Longwood, as if on his way to the stables or to visit his bête noire, de Montholon. He was dressed in the uniform of a General of the Ordnance and when he saw the boy, he came striding towards him, though Emmanuel was not conscious of it and stayed on his dawdling tangent. Gourgaud had gloves in his hand and, drawing level, turned the boy by the shoulders and began striking him with the gloves. This was very French, but it also looked worse than a blow from the hand itself, and seemed as if young Emmanuel had not merited flesh upon flesh. The boy took it with lowered head, taking only one step backwards, enduring. I ran from where I was and cried, ‘General Gourgaud, what are you doing?’

  There was no doubting Gourgaud was discomforted to see me, but not enough to cease. He got in three more swipes before I reached them, and only then stood back.

  ‘This is something you do not know about,’ he said in French.

  ‘He is mad,’ said Emmanuel in English. ‘One day I shall take a whip to him.’

  Gourgaud walked away five paces, rather like a duellist, turned and declared, ‘His father presumes to be the Emperor’s especial familiar and to exclude me from the presence, and this brat sits smirking! But where were the Las Cases when we were crossing the Berezina, this toad of a chamberlain and his abnormal son?’

  ‘He is more normal than you,’ I told Gourgaud. ‘Are you going to hit me?’

  For I could tell he was tempted, and that it would destroy him somehow with the Emperor.

  ‘Does the Emperor know you’re treating Emmanuel in this way?’ I asked.

  I could see a most uncomplicated, unworldly gratitude in Emmanuel’s eyes, and I did not want that, for it presumed too much.

  ‘His family is a family of thieves. He has stolen the Emperor from me without the Emperor’s
having made an attempt to recompense me for moneys I have outlaid. My mother … my mother is sick in France. My fortune has been spent by the Emperor, and this child’s father says no one can repay me. I left the meeting with a sense that I would strike the father, but I met the son and struck him. And God knows, miss, that’s normal enough.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. ‘Your knuckle clipped the corner of his lip. The boy is bleeding.’ For some reason it seemed to me the most pathetic blood of all time.

  Gourgaud turned to Emmanuel. ‘You are the child of a plunderer. Give me back my money.’ And then he trudged away, his boots emphatic on the barren ground of Longwood.

  ‘What a brute,’ I said to Emmanuel. ‘Doesn’t he find it adequate to hate Sir Hudson?’

  ‘He hates me more than he hates Sir Hudson.’

  ‘But why?’

  Emmanuel’s eyes rolled. ‘On the retreat across France, we needed francs and the Emperor borrowed them from Gourgaud. Now Gourgaud has a letter from his relatives saying that his mother is in need of money. He asked my father and de Montholon for his money back but how can we get a hundred thousand francs in a lump from Europe? And so he hits me to match the damage done to his mother.’ Emmanuel shrugged. ‘Perhaps there is a justice in it.’

  I cannot define what impulse led me to touch the bloodied corner of his mouth. I could see with horror that all at once he was contemplating attacking my mouth with his, but my alarm caused him to drop his head and cover my hand with kisses.

  ‘That’s enough,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry you were hurt. Well, goodbye!’

  And with that I mounted Old Tom and galloped off.

  Against the killing draughts of salt …

  On a clear morning in this period, when the vise of Sir Hudson’s administration was beginning to straighten the souls and indeed the bodies of the French at Longwood, the Emperor woke feeling fresh and went around knocking on the doors of each of the exiles and demanding their presence at breakfast in the garden at Longwood. Bertrand was already in the house, having come from Hutt’s Gate, and so was quickly alerted. Only Madame Bertrand was missing, and a servant was sent, and she arrived during the breakfast.