The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  Adding to the confusion, Dalesme had no idea whether or not Elba was still a French possession. A British ship had landed under the flag of truce late in April and its messenger presented Dalesme with an order to relinquish control to the British, and had shown him French newspapers detailing Napoleon’s abdication. But Dalesme dismissed this as a ploy to lure him into surrendering and the ship sailed back to the mainland. It was replaced the following day by another British vessel, this one carrying a representative from the French Provisional Government who finally convinced Dalesme that Napoleon was in fact en route to Elba.

  Armed with this latest intelligence, Dalesme told his men to be on the lookout for the French corvette Inconstant, which, as the French official had told him, would be carrying Napoleon and flying Bourbon white. Any ship not fitting this description was to be treated as an enemy.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE UNDAUNTED WAS BECALMED near the island of Capraia on the night of May 2. The ship gave a salute, answered by the island’s battery, after which some officials were invited on board. They told the crew about how things stood on Elba. The Undaunted’s passengers could just make out the fortifications topping the rocky ridge of Portoferraio, a shadow against the bloodshot sky. They took turns on the telescope. “Each of us,” recalled Peyrusse, “looked eagerly at this new country.”

  They reached Elba the following afternoon. A crossing that in fine weather could be done in two days had taken them nearly a week. As rowers pulled the tall ship toward the small horseshoe-shaped harbor tucked south behind Portoferraio’s main town, away from the open sea, watchmen at the edge of the quay sighted the well-armed ship flying the Royal Standard. Dalesme ordered them to aim their heavy cannons at the Undaunted, but after some minutes of standoff Ussher gave the signal for parley and the case of mistaken identity was solved.

  Campbell, Drouot, and a few other officers were brought to the quay. “The inhabitants,” wrote Campbell with his typical understatement, “appeared to view us with great curiosity.” Santini also disembarked, with a private mission to sound out the mood among the Elbans, who might more easily let their guard down around a fellow islander. He returned with a positive report, telling Napoleon that the people were overjoyed that such a great man was to be their sovereign. Bertrand stayed behind, so weakened by the sailing that he could hardly get out of his chair.

  On a bluff overlooking the harbor, Campbell and Drouot entered Fort Stella, named for its star-shaped footprint, where they met with Governor Dalesme. He was still struggling to make sense of this surreal change of events and later said he was only convinced that the handover wasn’t a ploy when he saw General Drouot, “whose integrity was a byword in the French army.” Drouot signed some documents to officially take possession of Elba in the name of the emperor Napoleon, who remained out of sight on the Undaunted.

  Also present at the fort was André Pons de l’Hérault, who as administrator of Elba’s mines oversaw the bulk of the island’s economy. While obscure by the standards of the French Empire he was the nearest thing Elba had to a Napoleonic figure. He went by Pons, though to the thousands of islanders depending on him for their livelihoods he was simply Babbo (Father). Born in the Occitan village of Sète to innkeepers of Spanish ancestry who had wanted him to go into the priesthood, he’d escaped that fate by going out to sea at the age of ten, becoming the master of a merchant ship while still a teenager, and later rising in the French military. Pons strategized with Campbell, Dalesme, and Drouot about how to smoothly transfer control of the island. He fought the urge to ask for a document confirming the unseen Napoleon’s claim, since, as he later recalled, “It would have been too insulting to make any demand that might show that we doubted anything said by the Emperor.”

  The landing party sailed back to the Undaunted, with Pons in tow for a reunion of sorts, as he and Napoleon had crossed paths in different military and political settings over the years. When they first met, in Toulon in the fall of 1793, both were ambitious artillery commanders of the Revolutionary Army engaged in taking back the harbors of that port town from the British. Napoleon and his family had recently landed at the small beach of Golfe-Juan as political refugees from Corsica. It was in Toulon that the twenty-four-year-old Bonaparte received his first significant public notice for orchestrating a clever barrage that broke the British siege and resulted in his promotion to brigadier general. In the battle he received a wound from a bayonet to the thigh that nagged him for life, and he suffered chest injuries after his horse was shot out from under him. It was also in Toulon that he tried, on Pons’s urging, his first taste of bouillabaisse, the traditional Provençal fish stew.

  Pons described himself in his memoirs as “republican before there was a Republic” and had remained faithful to France over the years, pleased to serve its government in whatever form it took. But by 1814 he was disillusioned by what he saw as Napoleon’s corruption of republican values in his search for personal glory. As with many sons and daughters of the Revolution, he couldn’t forgive the former General Bonaparte for crowning himself Napoleon I. The opulent coronation at Notre-Dame, where Napoleon had snatched the crown from the pope to place it on his own head; his marriage to an Austrian archduchess; his placing three brothers and one brother-in-law on foreign thrones; his reinstating slavery in the Caribbean colonies: all were abhorrent to Pons.

  “Now I was to appear before the great hero who had voluntarily thrown away his glorious halo!” he wrote. “I was to appear before the extraordinary man I had so often found blame with, even while admiring him, and on whose behalf I had so often prayed that he might win his holy struggle on our sacred soil! I was to present myself to the emperor Napoleon, but aboard a British frigate! It all seemed like a dream, a painful dream, a frightful dream.”

  On greeting Pons, Napoleon would have seen his own aging process reflected back to him. The mining administrator had grown plump and wore thin wire spectacles, which he attributed to too many nights poring over ledgers by lamplight. He practiced the bald man’s trick of growing out his meager tonsure of hair into long strands to be deployed at various angles. Though Napoleon’s junior by three years, he carried himself like someone who had already seen six or seven decades, if restful ones.

  To Pons, Napoleon no longer even closely resembled the long-haired, rake-thin officer he’d known in early adulthood. His face had gone puffy and pasty. And yet aboard the Undaunted, “carefully dressed” in his pristine green coat, white breeches, and red boots, he looked to Pons like “a soldier ready for an official reception.” His bright eyes offered little sign of shame and retained a trace of the ineffable glimmer that for the past two decades had helped to make him the focus of any room he entered.

  Campbell, in the background, tall and silent, put Pons on edge with his “artfully bandaged” head, his forced smile, and his searching gaze, “the perfection of the British type.” Their instant dislike was mutual; in his own journal, Campbell later referred to the unassuming Pons as “a violent intriguing fellow.”

  Napoleon said little that night. Pons recalled that when he spoke of the events that had brought him there he talked as if he were detached from the action and had only read about it in the papers, and that he managed with a few fatherly nods and grave looks to convey that he understood everything these excited children wanted to tell him, even as they tripped over their words. He pledged to do right by the people of Elba who were now his only concern. It was agreed that he should debark the next morning so that a suitable reception could be arranged overnight.

  Dalesme and Pons rowed back to the quay, where all sorts of rumors spread among the gathered crowd. Children stayed up late, trying to make sense of the story of the Corsican brought from France on a British ship to become Emperor of Elba.

  Across the water Napoleon paced the bridge of the Undaunted. He would have seen a constellation of flickering lights. Most, though not all, of the three thous
and inhabitants of Portoferraio had placed candles in their windows as a sign of welcome.

  { 5 }

  GILDED KEYS

  THE WALLS OF PORTOFERRAIO had been littered for weeks with proclamations promising penalties for any rebel Elbans. On the night before Napoleon’s landing these were pasted over and replaced by copies of his official message of greeting. Napoleon had “chosen” their island for “his sojourn,” it said, because of the kindness of its people and the mildness of its climate.

  Men and women worked into morning to build a stage of painted plaster that would host a sofa-chair-throne decorated with gold paper and scarlet rags. As the sun rose they were still busy lining the streets with ribbons and myrtle garlands. Portoferraio’s mayor, Traditi, had the keys to his cellar gilded overnight so they could be given to Napoleon as ceremonial keys to the city. Following Bertrand’s request that a large crowd be on hand at the quay, he called for representatives of all notable island families to come to Portoferraio for the landing, as though anyone needed encouragement to witness the arrival of the most famous man in the world. Some of the more prosperous Elbans sent along a few sticks of furniture for the unoccupied top floor of the town hall, formerly a bakery and still dubbed the Biscotteria, which was being cleared of cobwebs to house the emperor.

  On the Undaunted, Napoleon put the finishing touches on the flag he’d designed for Elba, which would be solid white, cut by a diagonal red stripe emblazoned with three golden bees. When proclaiming himself Emperor of the French a decade earlier he’d chosen this industrious insect as part of his imperial symbology, an antique motif connecting him to the past while signifying the immortality of his line. The white with red diagonal theme he borrowed from the standard of Cosimo de’ Medici, who had served as Elba’s protector from his base in sixteenth-century Florence, during which time Portoferraio had been known as Cosmopoli. The ship’s tailor crafted two flags from some extra canvas, to be hoisted when Napoleon reached the shore. “What a childish vanity!” wrote Ussher of seeing good sailcloth put to such use.

  Before breakfast Napoleon asked Ussher for the use of a rowboat to surreptitiously slip across the harbor so they could take a closer look at a farmhouse he’d seen at the edge of a small beach there when they sailed in. Crossing on the rowboat, beyond the protection of the Undaunted’s guns, Napoleon joked about being without his sword and wondered aloud if the Elbans were known to have any special taste for assassinations. “Evidently he is greatly afraid of falling in this way,” wrote Campbell in the day’s journal entry.

  After waiting two hours for someone to find keys to the farmhouse, Napoleon inspected the property, which left him unimpressed. None of the locals realized that the small man in the greatcoat and round hat was their emperor. “The peasants, considering us all as Englishmen, cried ‘Long Live the English!’” wrote Ussher.

  Back on the Undaunted for a light meal, Campbell said that Elba reminded him of the colonies. Several small craft were by then circling the ship, some near to sinking under the weight of curious bodies. Bright bouquets littered the bay. Napoleon heard people in the boats singing serenades and shouting vivas. After breakfast he presented each member of the Undaunted’s British crew with a bottle of wine and a gold coin. He’d always been good at keeping his troops well stocked with food and alcohol, and these Jack Tars were to be no exception. They in turn sent “Boney” off with a raucous toast to “good health and better luck next time!”

  The yards were manned and royal salutes fired from the Undaunted’s guns. Napoleon crossed to shore standing at the bow of a rowboat, while others carried officers, fifers, and drummers. The harbor was so clogged with rowboats and debris that this last leg of the trip took a full half hour.

  Shots from the battery and clanging bells greeted the landing. On Napoleon’s request, Campbell had arranged for some of the British marines to surround him as he stepped onto the quay. He took the keys from the pewter plate held by the mayor, who bumbled through a speech until Napoleon cut him off to make a brief impromptu address, which he capped by kissing a cross held by the local vicar. Out of the mass of people Napoleon spotted and called out the name of a sergeant he’d decorated years earlier; the man wept at being recognized. This was an old trick of Napoleon’s, whose skills of memory were legendary, though often aided by preparation and whispered help from his aides. After the speech, bread was distributed to the poor. The quay was full of “pretty little faces,” as Peyrusse described in a letter home, all wide-eyed and smiling. Napoleon had a crowd; he seduced it.

  Pushing against the multitude, Napoleon and his retinue passed through the Water Gate dividing Elba’s port from the main town square and on to the parish church. There they heard a Te Deum, the traditional ceremony combining thanks to God with prayers for a monarch, typically chanted at coronations and royal births, or to mark a military victory. French kings had used the Te Deum as a way to make their royal presence felt intimately though they were physically distant from their subjects. In Napoleon’s case the ruler being celebrated as though he were divine sat in the same small room where the hymns were being sung. He kept his head down, moving his lips in prayer, paying no attention to the other congregants. A wheezing beadle, short and round, presided. There were N’s of silvery paper on the whitewashed chapel walls.

  After the service they returned to the town hall, slowed by the pressing throng, everyone illuminated by the heavy glare of the high sun. In the ersatz throne room on the top floor Napoleon met with subprefects and magistrates and landowners, who heard his conversational voice for the first time. They could have reached out and touched him. A string quintet played in the corner. Vantini and Balbiani and Talavo and Traditi of Elba could now say they had shared something intimate with the man who until a month ago had been master of the world.

  Pons noticed that Napoleon spoke about places on the island with the familiarity of someone who had seen them all firsthand. He remained standing throughout, perhaps unwilling to dignify the sofa-cum-throne by actually sitting on it. “What is a throne?” he’d said a few months earlier in Paris. “A piece of lumber covered with a velvet rug. But in the language of monarchy, I am the throne!”

  Following the luncheon he was given a tour of Portoferraio. There wasn’t much to see. The fortifications, the church, the ramparts, the bay, the rectangular tree-lined Piazza d’Armi with its inn and a smoky café called the Buon Gusto where they specialized in aleatico, the local red wine, sweet and fruity and sometimes cut with fresh ginger to mask a poor-quality vintage: all lay within a few minutes’ walk of the town hall.

  “Anyone who thought Napoleon’s day was finished by this point didn’t know the man,” wrote Pons. “His day was only starting.” Next he went out riding to survey some of the surrounding territory, accompanied by Campbell, Ussher, and a few other officers. They went out through the Land Gate, Portoferraio’s main entrance, built into a tunnel and protected by a drawbridge spanning a narrow canal. It gave onto the Via della Porta a Terra, the lone road out of town.

  At sunset the riding party returned for a celebratory dinner capped by illuminations and fireworks, after which Napoleon went up to his slapdash bedroom on the top floor of the Biscotteria. It was musty and reeked of rotting fish. On a thin mattress splayed out on the hallway floor lay a British sergeant selected for the task, fully clothed, sword at his side, just as the long-gone bodyguard Roustam had done so many times before.

  Napoleon was more than six hundred miles from Paris. He had the night to make sense of his new surroundings since the townspeople kept him up with their singing and chattering below his window. He wrote to his wife, telling her his crossing had been smooth and the weather calm:

  I’ve arrived in the isle of Elba, which is very pretty. The accommodation is middling but I’ll have a home fitted up in a very few weeks. I’ve had no letter from you. It is my daily sorrow.

  { 6 }

  ROUGH MUSIC

  BEFORE
MARRYING HIM, the archduchess Maria Luisa had only ever known Napoleon as the enemy. She was four months old when France declared war against her father, and just short of two years when revolutionaries beheaded her great-aunt, Marie Antoinette. As a teenager she’d congratulated her father on his supposed victory at the battle of Eckmühl, writing that it “was with much joy that we heard Emperor Napoleon was there in person, for as he has lost such a battle he can lose his head as well.” After the victory report turned out to be false and the French occupied Vienna, she’d fled the city along with her stepmother and siblings. The Habsburg empire lost more than forty thousand square miles of territory and was made to pay an indemnity so heavy that the palace plate and silverware had to be melted down to help cover the immediate costs. Napoleon had presided over her family’s summer palace at Schönbrunn, enjoying operas and ballets from the comfort of the imperial box.

  On the heels of his Austrian triumph, late in 1809, Napoleon had sought a younger replacement for Joséphine, who was six years his senior. Though he claimed to still be very much in love with her, the divorce was necessary “for the welfare of the nation.” Or at least this was how he explained it to Joséphine, and only after having dodged being the first one to inform her of the break, leaving the task to his minister of police, who had told her the emperor needed to produce an heir for “the cohesion of the dynasty.” Napoleon had already conducted a successful experiment with his mistress Marie Walewska, who was by then pregnant with his child. The split with Joséphine had been finalized in a candlelit ceremony in Fontainebleau’s throne room, after which she took up residence at Château de Malmaison, their estate west of Paris (each had contributed half of the purchase price), which would be hers from then on. Napoleon sent her a new Sèvres dinner service and money to upgrade the gardens.