by Mark Braude
The day ended with the two men taking a conciliatory walk along the edge of the ironworks, only to be interrupted by some miners who pressed a petition into Napoleon’s hands asking that Pons be kept on as their overseer. The people of Rio weren’t known for their delicate manners; a local saying held that “it was easier for a Moor to become white than for an inhabitant of Rio to become polite.” Pons begged Napoleon not to think he’d arranged this ambush and got so flustered that he slipped into calling the emperor Monsieur, rather than Sire. Napoleon laughed off the breach in etiquette, never having been overly concerned with honorifics, especially after his time as an officer taught him how easily he could ingratiate himself to subordinates simply by letting them address him with the informal tu or by the nickname the “little corporal,” which he encouraged. Despite Napoleon’s assurances, Pons thought this tongue slip marked the fitting end to a disastrous day.
The next morning at his Rio home, he and Napoleon shared biscuits dipped in Málaga wine and Napoleon seemed to be in a better mood. But just as Pons started to relax, Napoleon struck, saying out of nowhere, “But you’ve written against me,” in the same casual voice with which he’d just praised the wine a few seconds earlier. Pons understood the meaning right away. Fifteen years earlier he’d authored a short tract in praise of republicanism and harshly critical of Napoleon. He explained that his brief experiment with political pamphleteering had been a mistake, a not-so-youthful indiscretion. Napoleon only nodded. They never discussed the matter again. Remembering their exchange years later, Pons still had no idea how Napoleon had learned about his obscure pamphlet.
They rode back to the Land Gate of Portoferraio, where Pons left Napoleon so he could join his wife and daughters at their home near the quay. Later, from Dalesme, he learned that his apparent hurry to get away had upset Napoleon since manners dictated that he should have first seen his riding companion all the way to his own door. “He was right,” wrote Pons, “but one must have some sympathy for an old republican who found himself suddenly transplanted into a new world.”
Pons received a letter from Bertrand officially endorsing his continued employment as chief administrator of Elba’s mines. A few months later, Paymaster Peyrusse would record the transfer of 50,349 francs from the accounts of the mines into the Elban treasury.
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MY ISLAND IS VERY LITTLE
NAPOLEON SAID THAT ELBA was to be an “isle of rest,” but Campbell had yet to see anything to convince him that this would be the case. After only a few days with Napoleon he wrote:
I have never seen a man in any situation of life with so much personal activity and restless perseverance. He appears to take so much pleasure in perpetual movement and in seeing those who accompany him sink under fatigue, as has been the case on several occasions when I have accompanied him. I do not think it possible for him to sit down to study, on any pursuits of retirement, as proclaimed by him to be his intention, so long as his state of health permits corporeal exercise.
Napoleon’s reputation as a relentless dynamo was by then already well established, so much so that his critics pointed to his fierce energy as the cause of all the recent destruction. As Talleyrand once quipped, “What a pity the man wasn’t lazy.”
Napoleon wanted to see Monte Orello, which stood at the center of the island, about a thousand feet high. He and Campbell rode up to its peak on May 10. They discovered a small chapel that had been built by a hermit, long since dead. The climb had been grueling and Campbell joked that it would take more than “common devotion” to get people to attend services in such a setting, to which Napoleon agreed, adding that “here the priest can talk as much nonsense as he likes.” And then, as Campbell recalled, Napoleon went quiet for some time and looked around in all directions. To the north was the Ligurian coast. Corsica, nearly forty times larger than Elba, was near at hand to the west. Below that was Sardinia, dwarfing Corsica, and beyond that lay the western tip of Sicily and the unseen Tunisian coast. Napoleon smiled, shook his head, and said, “Eh! My island is very little!”
Returning to Portoferraio along a sunbaked country road, they met a finely dressed young woman who spoke to Napoleon “with great ease and gaiety,” simpering that she’d been invited to a ball a few nights back but on hearing the emperor wouldn’t be there had decided it wasn’t worth going to at all. Campbell could tell how much Napoleon enjoyed these rides around the island, ambling along deserted mule paths and humming “Italian music, which he does very often, and seemingly quite in spirits.” He liked to suddenly veer off from a main path and into some thicket buzzing with insects, playing at shaking off the officers who tailed behind him wherever he went.
Each new bit of the island seemed to spark a fresh memory of some other place. Napoleon told Campbell during one hillside trek that it reminded him of crossing the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Alps, more than eight thousand feet above sea level, early in his Italian campaign. Back then he’d chatted with a young peasant who had no idea who he was and who talked of how wonderful life must be for those who possessed a decent house and a workable number of cattle and sheep. He asked the peasant to “enumerate his greatest desires, afterwards sent for him, and gave him enough to purchase all that he had described.” He told Campbell the man’s happiness had cost him sixty thousand francs, which he considered money well spent.
Napoleon’s tours were as much about having people see their new ruler as they were about his sizing up the island’s commercial and military potential. He understood the importance of maintaining appearances, doubly so in this place where he lived so near his subjects. Even the most casual wanderings were preceded by detailed instructions on protocol from Bertrand to the village mayors, and each new stop meant another reception, as people vied to outdo their neighbors in making grand displays. Campbell soon adapted to the routine, the “firing of musketry and cannon, triumphal arches with inscriptions, processions of priests bearing a canopy and accompanied by young girls and children strewing flowers who led him into the church.” Always a church. At the close of a day spent at four services in four separate towns, Napoleon asked Campbell if he worried he might be turning “devout.”
The Elbans could sometimes annoy Napoleon with their rustic ways. Near Porto Longone he was repulsed by some villagers who knelt in the muck and prostrated themselves as he passed, an unthinking obsequiousness he blamed on their “education at the hands of the monks,” as Campbell wrote. Wherever he went people pounced on him with all sorts of requests. Some begged alms, some just wanted to kiss his hand. To the Elbans he appeared to be forever in motion, spotted all across the island (often in two or more places at once) on foot, on horseback, in his carriage, in his rowboat, but never alone.
On such surveys Napoleon would have seen cypresses, heather, and chestnut trees, bright violets and purple cyclamen, aloes and agave, myrtle and tamarisk and lilies of the Nile. He would have passed limestone hills sloping down to the shore and craggy ranges of granite, their peaks usually wrapped tightly by clouds. Terraced vineyards dotted the hillsides, as did yellow broom and lupine shrubs, the hallowed macchia of the Mediterranean. Along the coasts were men worrying the salt pans and tending huge nets bearing tunny and anchovy. Others carted mineral hauls to tall ships waiting at Portoferraio. To the west, across the island from Rio’s iron mines, were quarries for granite and marble, the point of origin for the Parthenon’s columns, the walls of the Pisa cathedral, and the Medici chapel in Florence. Along the ragged shoreline Napoleon would have seen sandy beaches and rocky bays, so numerous that no one had yet to properly count them.
Like many Mediterranean populations, the Elbans cherished the power and mystery of their island’s mythic past. Elba had been a landing point for Jason and the Argonauts on their way to seek the golden fleece, and according to Virgil the “isle renown’d for steel, and unexhausted mines” had supplied three hundred soldiers to fight the Trojan War. But though rich in legend and mineral depo
sits, Elba was hardly a self-sufficient Eden. Due to its relative isolation and small size (223 square kilometers), the island had passed through many hands over the centuries. Ligurians, Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans, Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Vandals, Lombards, Turks, Genoese, Pisans, Spaniards, Florentines, the English, and the French had all laid claim, while all sorts of pirates and marauders, including the notorious Barbarossa, would sack each new settlement as soon as it went up.
So much back-and-forth meant that no single power had stayed long enough to set up much by the way of infrastructure. When Napoleon first sent men over to improve fortifications, in 1802, the detachment had more than its share of “deserters and robbers picked out of a colonial depot,” as one French commander recalled. Along with the first wave of French settlers, more than a few outsiders had come in the ensuing years, eyed warily by locals claiming lineage that spanned back several generations. After twelve years the French had little to show for their labors aside from two primary schools, two hospitals, a few narrow unpaved roads, a main artery to connect Portoferraio and Marciana, and a small armed force.
Elba remained riven by long-standing regional divisions. Each village was like a smaller island within the larger one. Pons wrote that he’d lived for years in Rio without meeting anyone there hailing from Marciana, and had never heard of anyone from Rio moving to Marciana. The people of Porto Longone lived like “prisoners” in their own town, he said, while the people of Campo (present-day Campo nell’Elba) were indifferent to anything beyond their front yards unless it related to their meager wine trade. Portoferraio was populated mainly by Tuscans, while Porto Longone was mostly Spanish-speaking. Neapolitans dominated the fishing trade, while Corsicans were dotted all around, having infiltrated nearly every industry.
What united all of them, save for a few estate owners, merchants, and financiers, was poverty. The mineral-rich ground was too rocky to grow decent-sized crops. Soil tended to run from sulfurous yellow to sun-bleached beige, and only rarely did one see truly black earth. Citrus, fig, and olive groves occupied what little flat ground could be found, but their yields were slim and harvests difficult to plan, as long stretches of drought would be suddenly broken by mammoth thunderstorms, leaving the land as confused as its tenders. With so many men conscripted there were never enough laborers to work the fields, and the population hadn’t really grown in the past twenty years. Bouts of typhus, dysentery, and malaria hit every so often and spread with fierce speed because the infrequent rain bursts weren’t sufficient to wash away the waste that piled up in the gutters that ran down the middles of the sloping streets. It was a landscape that bred reliance on strangers, and most years the Elbans imported the bulk of their grain, wood, and meat.
Now Napoleon could imagine himself a modern Augustus, finding a city of bricks he would leave as one of marble. As much as it would benefit his rural subjects, “civilizing” the island could also serve as testament to his reign. After all, his “passion for monuments nearly equaled his passion for war,” as his personal secretary and childhood friend Bourrienne once said about him.
Before two weeks on Elba were up, Napoleon boasted to Pons that he already “knew his island by heart.” Surveying the place in its entirety, or near so, would have marked a kind of victory for a man who had tried to extend his gaze so much farther than anyone of his time had thought possible. From now on he would spend his days looking mostly at weary faces, sun-faded uniforms, cramped rooms, leather-bound books, his furniture, his garden, looping cobblestoned streets, horses, carriages and ships, the ocean, and stars. But he could still point to some place on the map and say that there he alone was master of all he could see.
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LOUIS THE GOUTY AND THE WEATHERVANE MAN
WHILE NAPOLEON HAD BEEN traveling down from Fontainebleau to begin his exile, the restored Louis XVIII was embarked on his own southern voyage, in his case returning from banishment. He’d fled France in 1791 at the age of thirty-five, disguised as a British trader. From then on he’d been on a strange sort of Grand Tour, traveling from place to place across Europe, sometimes staying in the grand chateaus of fellow nobles proud to host a man they regarded as a rightful king-in-absentia and other times holing up in less luxurious surroundings, including a brief stretch in Verona, where he lived above a shop in a tiny apartment.
The past five years Louis had lived at Hartwell House in bucolic Buckinghamshire. Gout-ridden and obese, he indulged his appetites for rich food and lively company while the British and Russian governments covered the bulk of his expenses and helped to distribute royalist propaganda calling for his return to the French throne. When a marquis rushed to Hartwell to tell him of Napoleon’s abdication, saying, “Sire, you are King of France!,” Louis reputedly answered, “Have I ever ceased to be?”
He left Hartwell accompanied by his niece and two Bourbon cousins, the elderly Louis-Joseph, prince de Condé, and his son, Louis Henri, bound for Paris but first stopping in London for his first official state visit with the prince regent at Carlton House. Lord Byron described the scene to a friend:
At this present writing, Louis the Gouty is wheeling in triumph into Piccadilly in all the pomp and rabblement of Royalty. I had an offer of seats to see him pass, but as I have seen a Sultan going to mosque and been at his reception of an ambassador, the most Christian King “hath no attractions for me.”
London had just passed through its worst fog in more than fifty years, though the skies had cleared on the day of Napoleon’s abdication, as though victory had been heaven-sent. People rushed out to the streets to celebrate the fall of “the usurper,” ringing bells, singing songs, and lighting off crackers. Over a roast beef and plum pudding banquet for eight thousand in the coastal town of Great Yarmouth, whose port had so often teemed with battleships outfitted to fight the French, revelers hanged, burned, and buried their fallen enemy in effigy. “Nap the Mighty is gone to pot,” wrote the young Thomas Carlyle to a friend, twice underlining the sentence.
At a time when the major British papers boasted annual print runs in the millions, any edition promising new details of Napoleon’s defeat promptly sold out. Caricaturists competed to dream up the most pathetic scene of his surrender: Napoleon in handcuffs, shoeless and in tatters, being dragged to the ocean’s edge where the devil waits to ferry him off to his island hell; Napoleon and his brothers pressed into a chain gang and whipped by a Cossack; Napoleon grasping for his crown as it’s lifted from his head by a black eagle while imperial bees fly off his red robe; Napoleon brandishing a broken sword, faced backward toward Fontainebleau while his pathetic donkey follows a sign for Elba; Napoleon being smacked by Talleyrand’s crutch while soldiers shout, “Bone him, my tight little Tally!”
Some detractors thought Napoleon’s unwillingness to fall on his sword like defeated emperors of old revealed the weakness of his character. “He is deserted by all and called a craven for not putting an end to his degraded existence,” wrote the young baronet and diarist John Cam Hobhouse to Byron from Paris, adding that he’d heard the emperor’s own supporters had left pistols and poisons on his table. At one time both young men had idolized Napoleon, but his inglorious fall lacked the panache of the dramatic career that had so captivated them. Napoleon might have agreed. Years later, on Saint Helena, he said he “ought to have died at the Battle of Moscow,” meaning the bloodbath at Borodino in 1812, the deadliest battle in the history of warfare until the First World War, which had opened the road to Moscow and ruin.
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LOUIS XVIII AND HIS RETINUE sailed from Dover to Calais aboard a yacht borrowed from the prince regent, escorted by eight British ships of the line. On May 2 they reached the chateau of Saint-Ouen, north of Paris, where Louis signed a declaration guaranteeing a liberal constitution, a bicameral legislature, and freedom of the press. He dated the document “the nineteenth year of his reign,” as though he’d been king ever since the death of his you
ng nephew, who would have been first in line to inherit the throne as Louis XVII had he not died of illness at the age of ten. Talleyrand had begged Louis not to include that turn of phrase, knowing that people still thought of the recent past with some pride and would never accept the pretense that during the years they had followed Napoleon the exiled Bourbon had been their true ruler all along. Talleyrand also hoped that Louis would take the title of King of the French, rather than styling himself by his preferred moniker, King of France and Navarre, which would send a signal that the new regime’s power emanated from the people rather than the sovereign, but failed to convince him.
The English artist Thomas Underwood was among the thousands in Paris who crowded around the Porte Saint-Denis, remnant of the city’s medieval fortifications and northern gateway to its heart, to witness Louis’s entry. Under “a cloudless sky and the temperature of the dog-days,” Underwood had the bad luck to be pressed in next to a roadside burial mound containing the rotting corpses of a few hundred victims of the recent fighting. The smell “was most horrible.” He spotted one of Napoleon’s magnificent carriages drawn by eight white horses. It had been repainted Bourbon white and emblazoned with fleurs-de-lys, and it carried Louis XVIII squeezed into a blue overcoat with gold epaulettes, his head bedecked with an oversized hat. His niece, the duchesse d’Angoulême, accompanied him, as did the future and current princes de Condé, with hair curled and powdered in the style of the ancien régime. Louis’s relatively more athletic younger brother, the comte d’Artois, rode on horseback alongside, escorted by his two sons, one of them wearing an English uniform because he hadn’t found proper dress in time for the ceremony.
