Napoleon was cheered wherever they stopped to change horses, but after Valence, where they were received by a less than enthusiastic guard of honour, they entered traditionally royalist country. The French cavalry escort was to have been replaced by Austrians and Russians, but Napoleon had refused to be escorted by his enemies like a prisoner. On 24 April outside Valence he met Augereau, whose corps was stationed along the road. He went up to his old comrade-in-arms, removed his hat and embraced him, but the other only tipped his forage cap and did not return the embrace. They exchanged a few words, but Augereau showed no wish to prolong the encounter.18
At Orange they were met with shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’ and stones were thrown at his carriage. At Avignon there was no more than a sullen crowd hissing, but at Orgon he and his party were treated to the sight of a dummy representing Napoleon in a uniform covered in red paint swinging from a gibbet with a placard saying that was how the tyrant would end up. The carriage was besieged by a crowd of people ‘drunk with hatred and some with wine’, in the words of Shuvalov, who, along with Köller and the powerfully-built Noverraz, fought them off with fists while Napoleon cowered in the carriage. The event had been orchestrated by local royalists, probably with the support of the authorities, and Shuvalov was convinced that it was only a matter of luck that Napoleon himself had not replaced the dummy on the gibbet.
Napoleon lost his nerve. Once they had left the town he stopped to relieve himself, then put on a blue cloak and a round hat with a white Bourbon cockade, mounted a horse and rode on ahead of the conspicuous convoy. When the commissioners caught up with him at an inn at La Callade, they found him slumped at a table with tears pouring down his face; he had not been recognised, and the innkeeper had told him that Napoleon was travelling down the road and would be lynched, as he deserved to be, being responsible for the deaths of her son and her nephew. Thereafter he wore Köller’s uniform, and an escort of Austrian hussars was provided.
The party stopped for the night at a château outside Le Luc, where Pauline was staying. The two siblings spent the evening together, and she promised to visit him on Elba. The journey continued without incident to Fréjus. On the evening of 28 April he boarded the British frigate HMS Undaunted, Captain Ussher, greeted by a twenty-one-gun salute. The Prussian and Russian commissioners took their leave, and only Campbell and Köller went aboard with him.19
The crossing took five days, and it was not until 3 May that the Undaunted arrived off Portoferraio, Elba’s principal port and town. The 245 square kilometres of rocky island, fifteen kilometres off the Tuscan coast, was not the most hospitable place, and its 12,000 inhabitants, who had been Napoleon’s subjects since 1802, were not well disposed – there had been minor revolts against French rule recently and some of the garrison had mutinied, so both Napoleon and the British officers accompanying him were nervous. The islanders had no inkling of recent events in France, but when they discovered the war was over and they were to host the great Napoleon, they assumed a golden era had dawned for them. They greeted him with all the pomp that an island port town of 3,000 inhabitants could muster.
The day after coming ashore, Napoleon was up at four in the morning inspecting the city’s defences, a presage of what was to follow; over the next few months he would apply himself to what he referred to as his ‘little cabbage-patch’, as he had to rebuilding France after 1799. He identified a suitable building, the Villa Mulini, for his ‘palace’, and had it refurbished and extended with another floor (to accommodate Marie-Louise and the King of Rome). He did the same to a smaller summer retreat in the hills, at San Martino. He designed a flag for his new kingdom, a white square with a left-to-right diagonal red band with three of his armorial bees on it. He set up a court under the marshal of the palace Bertrand, nominating chamberlains from among local notables, and a military establishment under General Drouot. Bertrand, a military engineer by profession, had been campaigning with him since the Egyptian expedition; he had succeeded Duroc in his charge and was utterly devoted. The same was true of Drouot, a talented gunner who had commanded the hundred-piece battery that had tipped the scales at Wagram.
Within a week of landing, Napoleon had scouted the whole island in detail. He set about making roads, which were almost entirely lacking, and from there went on to building aqueducts, organising drainage, sanitation, wheat cultivation, dictating letters on the subject of poultry farming, tuna fisheries and horticulture with the same concentration with which he had treated matters of state at the Tuileries. His principal collaborator was André Pons de l’Hérault, the director of the island’s only major resource, its iron mines. Pons was a former Jacobin and artillery officer whom Napoleon had met at Toulon in 1793; he was then twenty, and had treated Buonaparte to his first taste of the local speciality, bouillabaisse. Originally a supporter, he had disapproved of Napoleon’s assumption of the imperial title and become a declared enemy, but within a few weeks of working with him was won over and became one of his most devoted supporters. For Napoleon it was essential to get the mines working as efficiently as possible, since they were practically the only source of revenue of the barren island.
Money was a major preoccupation, and on reaching the island Napoleon had sat down with his treasurer Pierre Guillaume Peyrusse to take stock. Elba’s taxes brought in 100,000 francs a year, and the iron mines yielded no more than 300,000. That would barely pay for the administration of the island. Napoleon had brought with him 489,000 francs in his petite cassette. Peyrusse had managed to save 2,580,000 from the imperial treasury which had followed the Regency Council to Blois, and to bring it to Fontainebleau. Marie-Louise had withdrawn another 911,000 at Orléans and despatched it to her husband. But according to their calculations, the total of just under four million francs would not last beyond 1816, given that along with his own household Napoleon had to pay for the upkeep of military personnel totalling 1,592. Under the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau he was to receive an annual subsidy of two and a half million francs from the French government, but nobody was under any illusion that Louis XVIII, who had assumed the throne of France, would honour them.20
Napoleon would say to anyone he met that he was ‘dead to the world’, and he appeared content in the role of Lilliputian monarch. Although he held receptions and balls, receiving the wives of the local functionaries as though they had been those of French notables and the numerous tourists who called at the island (over sixty Britons alone dropped in as part of their Grand Tour) as though they had been visiting princes, he lived a quiet and, by his own admission, a very ‘bourgeois’ life. He felt the absence of female company keenly, and was anxious to have his wife and son join him. He kept writing, urging her to come, but she only received some of the letters he sent through trusted secret channels to Méneval, whom she had kept on as her secretary; those sent openly were confiscated. Letters from her only got through sporadically. At the end of June she was still declaring her intention to join him (by now it was clear that his brothers were not going to settle on Elba), but within a month she had succumbed to various pressures that changed her mind. One was that while the Treaty of Fontainebleau had awarded her the duchy of Parma, it was now clear that she would not be getting it, and the only way she could assure her future and that of her son was by staying close to her father at Vienna. Another was that an Austrian officer assigned to act as her equerry with a brief to dissuade her from going to Elba had been so successful as to become her lover (and, in time, husband). She was being urged to make a public declaration against Napoleon, and was gradually being worn down by various people telling her to be reasonable.21
At the beginning of June news reached him that Josephine had died at Malmaison. He was so upset that he would not see anyone for two days. But a few days later he received a rare mark of affection and loyalty when Jérôme’s wife, who was the daughter of the King of Württemberg, wrote asking him to stand godfather to the child she was carrying. ‘Circumstances can have no bearing on our feelings, and we
will always take pride in regarding you, Sire, as the head of our family, and I, for myself, will never forget that Your Majesty never ceased to give us proofs of his friendship and that you made my happiness by uniting me with the King,’ she wrote. The arrival of Pauline at the beginning of July also cheered him; she only stayed for two days, but would be back for good in October. His mother arrived on 2 August and settled into a house close by the Villa Mulini, and they often dined together and played cards afterwards. She was the only person who dared confront him about his cheating, whereupon he would, according to Peyrusse, shuffle all the cards on the table around, scoop up the money and reply that he had played fair, but later hand it to his valet Marchand, who would give it back to its rightful owners. With the return of Pauline in October the little court grew merrier, although her hypochondria often put everyone to inconvenience. She also contrived to have the furniture from her husband’s palace at Turin brought to Elba, adding some splendour to the ‘palace’ of Mulini.22
At the beginning of September, Maria Walewska arrived with their son, accompanied by her younger sister Antonia and her brother Theodore Łączyński. Napoleon made elaborate plans to house them in an abandoned hermitage next to which he had erected a tent in which he occasionally spent the night. The party arrived at dusk on a small vessel which put into a quiet bay far away from Portoferraio, and were discreetly taken up to the hideaway, where Napoleon spent a couple of idyllic days playing with his son and visiting his mistress at night. But a small island is no place for secrets, and word soon got around that Marie-Louise and the King of Rome had arrived. The population grew excited, and Napoleon realised that if news of the visit were to leak out it would both scupper any remaining chances of Marie-Louise coming, and damage his reputation. So after two days the little party were smuggled off the island.23
Napoleon could not keep anything secret for long, as he was surrounded by spies. Talleyrand had a network of informers based in Livorno, with an agent in Napoleon’s household. The French government had another based on nearby Corsica, and another handled from the south of France. The British had one run by a former consul in the area, and Metternich had a formidable web of spies all over northern Italy which extended to the islands. Napoleon had his informers in Tuscany and on Corsica, and was the recipient of a great deal of information from sympathisers in France. He also gleaned much from visiting Britons.24
He knew of a number of plans by French royalists and government agents to remove or assassinate him, and felt dangerously exposed; the seas around were infested by pirates operating from North Africa for whom he would have constituted a rich prize, and this greatly facilitated anyone bent on landing in order to assassinate him. At one point he became so nervous that he slept in a different room every night. His contingent of grenadiers and lancers were a defence, but as it was now almost certain that the French government was not going to pay him his due, he would soon have to let them go, and then he would be defenceless. Colonel Campbell believed Napoleon was resigned to his fate, and warned his superiors in London that the only thing that might make him restive was lack of funds.25
Whether Napoleon was temperamentally capable of remaining the sovereign of a tiny island or not is academic, as the allies would not let him. Louis XVIII would not provide him with the means of support, and Francis had no intention of letting him see his daughter and grandchild again. To deprive a man of an income and the company of his wife and child is to deny him the basics of a settled life, and in this case it was also to rob him of his last remaining status symbol. The message was clear: he had been allowed to possess a princess as a conquering Attila, but now he had been defeated he was to be put in his place as the undesirable upstart he was. With a Habsburg princess at his side he had to be treated with a modicum of respect. Without, he could be treated as the allies wished.
From the moment they heard of Alexander’s gesture of giving him Elba, the allied ministers determined to remove him to a more remote place. The British had presciently weaselled out of ratifying the Treaty of Fontainebleau with a bizarre formula whereby they ‘took notice’ of it, even though Castlereagh had signed it along with the other ministers. The prime minister Lord Liverpool had already mooted the possibility of imprisonment on some more distant island, such as St Helena in the South Atlantic. By October 1814, as the ministers and monarchs gathered at Vienna for the peace congress that had been convoked to settle the affairs of Europe, it was no secret that they intended to move him; it had even been mentioned in the press. Napoleon brought up the matter with Campbell, protesting that lack of funds and the intentions of the Great Powers were making his position untenable.26
He was not the man to sit tight and wait to be assassinated or incarcerated, and he began considering his options. Short of evading the Royal Navy and making a dash for the United States, where he could settle as a private citizen, there was nowhere he could go. Only France seemed a possibility. He had never entirely accepted what had happened; when they met on his arrival at Portoferraio, he had spoken to Pons de l’Hérault of recent events as though they had nothing to do with him, and he appeared to have persuaded himself that if Marmont had not betrayed him he would still be emperor. In conversation with Campbell, he sometimes gave the impression that he was expecting to be called back to France at any moment.27
In royalist parts of the country the restoration of the Bourbons was welcomed; elsewhere it was accepted with varying degrees of relief and hope. But the behaviour of Louis XVIII, and particularly of his brother Artois and the émigrés who returned with them, soon began to offend. The hierarchy that had grown up to manage France over the past decade and a half was humiliated and often penalised, there were demands for property to be returned to its former owners, the Church began a religious crusade to recapture the soul of the country, and an atmosphere of hatred and revenge entered village as well as Paris life. The army was the object of particular vindictiveness, with men and officers being humiliated and retired on half-pay. Its glorious achievements were denigrated, its regiments renumbered, its colours changed. Within six months of recovering the throne, the Bourbons had alienated a considerable proportion of the population and almost the entire army.
Active and retired officers and men began to talk of the good old days, and to conspire to bring them back. News of this reached Napoleon, and a return to France presented itself as the only way to avoid being deported to a grim island prison. It was a gamble, but daring had always worked for him in the past, and his return from Egypt must have haunted his thoughts. He began taking note of the movement of the British ships on station in the area, and of the comings and goings of Campbell, who was acting as an informal gaoler, visiting the island for days at a time and then going off to mainland Italy. By the beginning of February 1815 Napoleon had made up his mind.
He repaired the French brig Inconstant, which he had inherited, and improved the seaworthiness of a number of smaller vessels, on which he surreptitiously loaded stores. He had his grenadiers lay out new gardens near the port, and invented excuses for his other troops to ready themselves. They received their order to embark on 26 February. It was a Sunday, and that morning at the lever he had informed those present of his plans, after which he heard mass as usual in a provincial simulacrum of the Saint-Cloud custom. His mother, who along with Pauline had been informed on the previous day, expressed severe reservations, but Napoleon ignored them. As his men marched down to the harbour, accompanied by the townsfolk, who had no idea what was happening but warmed to a spectacle, he prepared a proclamation to the troops and to the French people. In the evening he went down to the harbour and, after a brief speech to the local authorities who had assembled and who expressed grief at his departure, he went aboard.28
43
The Outlaw
At nine o’clock on the evening of 26 February 1815 the Inconstant slipped out of Portoferraio followed by six smaller craft. Temporarily becalmed, the flotilla spotted the sails of a British ship and in the course
of its onward journey crossed the paths of three French naval vessels, but the soldiers lay down on deck to keep out of sight, and it reached the coast of France without incident, sailing into the Golfe Juan on 1 March.
A few curious locals came to gawp at the unusual number of ships in the bay, but there was little interest even when Napoleon came ashore late that afternoon and made camp on French soil once more. Twenty men sent off to nearby Antibes were arrested. Napoleon had instructed his soldiers not to use their weapons, and it is doubtful they would have even if he had wished; when questioned later they admitted that they were delighted to be back in France, but had no stomach for fighting fellow Frenchmen. In the event, they had no need to. They set off at midnight, along side roads in order to avoid confrontation, attracting little attention as they went. The soldiers had grown unused to long marches, and they had to carry all their equipment as they had brought only a few horses, so the column soon stretched into an untidy string of small groups struggling along as best they could. They bought horses along the way, but these were passed to the lancers, who had been lugging their saddles as well as their arms.1
In two proclamations, from his Guard calling on former comrades to join them and from him to his people, in which he branded Marmont and Augereau as traitors, Napoleon portrayed himself as coming to the rescue of suffering France, whose laments had reached him on Elba, and announced that ‘The eagle bearing the national colours will fly from belfry to belfry all the way to the towers of Notre Dame.’ There was no eagle and no national colours – until in one small town someone produced a gilded wooden bedpost or curtain-rail finial in the shape of one which was attached to a pole and adorned with strips of blue, white and red cloth.2
Napoleon Page 71
