The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  no influence on the Court in Vienna except to make them keep me away still longer from Parma. I shall give my ministers my most sacred word of honor that I shall not go to the island of Elba at the moment, that I shall never go (for you know better than anyone that I have no desire to do so).

  { 23 }

  TOURIST SEASON

  NAPOLEON SUMMONED CAMPBELL TO the Mulini palace to ask about his Italian trip. After keeping him waiting for several minutes while he finished a card game with his mother, Napoleon “came up tripping and smiling. Asked me how I did? Said I had got fatter. Was I quite well? Where had I been. ‘What news? You are come, then, to stay some days with us?’” He wanted to know every detail of Campbell’s travels, down to whether he’d “applied the water in a stream through a pipe” at the Lucca baths. After a barrage of questions and answers, during which Napoleon tried to learn as much about the political situation on the mainland as possible, Campbell revealed that the prince regent had officially approved his continued stay on Elba. Napoleon only nodded. And then he smiled, said he looked forward to seeing Campbell again soon, turned around, and left the room.

  Campbell was left confused by this relatively cold reception. Not knowing what else to do, he sailed the next morning for Livorno. In his journal he justified the decision by noting that most Elbans had still yet to pay their back taxes, defying Napoleon’s July 1 deadline, and that he thought it would be better for him to be away when that situation finally came to a head. As he readied to put out to sea, a village priest pressed a document into his hands, asking that he pass it along to his superiors. It was a request to the British to come intervene on behalf of the Elbans to keep them from having to pay unjust taxes.

  Campbell traveled through Tuscany for much of August. He went to dinners and balls, returned to the baths, dined again with the Contessa Miniaci, bet on the horses, played at cards, and pored over letters intercepted from various Bonapartes. He traded information with a few other officials and learned that while he was away Napoleon had boarded the Inconstant escorted by fifty men and stayed there for two hours. The agent who supplied this report suggested that Napoleon was preparing to fetch Marie Louise, but Campbell thought it was more likely a routine check of the ship’s weapons prompted by some recent sightings of Barbary corsairs. One night in Livorno, a strange man presented himself to Campbell, claiming to be the nephew of Ricci, Campbell’s Elban contact, and looking for work on the island. When pressed about his background the man changed his story to say that he was only a distant relation of Ricci’s. “He told me he was going to Pisa, in case I did not hire him, on account of a wound in the head received while serving in the French army,” wrote Campbell. “He said he had been a soldier for many years and had a passport signed by the Mayor of Portoferraio. I think he has been sent to me as a spy!”

  During this time Campbell finally received his first clear directive from Castlereagh, though it was far from a major one. Castlereagh had written to say he was heading to Vienna for the upcoming peace congress and advised Campbell to continue sending his dispatches to London; he could send duplicates to Vienna, but should only incur the expense of using a courier for reports significant enough to “require immediate dispatch.” That was the whole of Castlereagh’s instruction.

  Late in the month Campbell sailed back to Portoferraio, but while he was docking, someone told him that they were about to mark Napoleon’s birthday, which he thought he’d avoided since it had fallen on August 15, but the man at the dock explained that the festivities had been delayed two weeks out of respect for the late Joséphine. Campbell turned back immediately for Livorno, writing in his journal that he “did not wish to be present at the formal celebrations of Napoleon’s birthday.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NAPOLEON’S FORTY-FIFTH BIRTHDAY party proved to be the biggest event Elba had ever seen, a costlier and more raucous affair than even the San Cristino feast. There was dancing in a wooden ballroom erected in Portoferraio’s main square, races that pitted stallions from the imperial stables against others ferried across from Italy, fireworks displays, and cannon salutes from the ships and forts. Pons won a prize for the evening’s finest display, having spelled out NAPOLEON in the windows of his home: a letter capped by a star in each window framed by lamps in republican red, white, and blue. Napoleon, somber and subdued, occupied himself by distributing gifts. The night could hardly have matched the birthday celebrations of his heyday, when he’d managed to have the day fêted as a national holiday as the Feast of Saint Napoleon, which, thanks to some finagling by the pope, technically commemorated a little-known Christian martyr of the same name.

  The morning after his birthday feast, Napoleon left Portoferraio for the mountain retreat next to the chapel of the Madonna above Marciana. He’d arranged to borrow it from the hermit for a few days. He wrote again to Marie Louise, thanking her for a letter containing a lock of her hair she’d sent for his birthday:

  I am here in a hermitage, 3834 feet above sea level, overlooking the Mediterranean on all sides, and in the midst of a forest of chestnut trees. Madame [Mère] is staying in the village, 958 feet lower down. This is a most pleasant spot. My health is very good, I spend part of the day shooting. I long to see you, and my son, too. . . . There are some very fine landscapes to be drawn here. Goodbye, my dearest Louise. All my love.

  And then, a few nights later, Marie Louise and her son were seen landing at a desolate beach at the edge of the village of San Giovanni, the site of the farmhouse Napoleon had inspected and rejected months earlier when first landing on Elba. Someone had seen a brig anchored far from Portoferraio’s harbor and then, after going down to take a closer look at the boat, had seen soldiers setting a small fire on the sand. At this signal two women and a small child were rowed to shore by a man. They walked to one of Napoleon’s berlins waiting at the top of the beach. Escorted by several riders lit in profile against the moon, the carriage traveled quietly through the night of September 1 and up to Marciana, where soldiers stood watch at the bottom of the steep rocky path lined with stations of the cross that had beckoned generations of pilgrims up to the hilltop chapel.

  By the next morning, people were making preparations for welcoming the empress. They traded reports of how dazzling her jewels had been as they reflected the firelight at the beach. They speculated that the other woman seen in the rowboat must have been her lady-in-waiting, and that the man who had rowed them in must have been her stepson, Prince Eugène. The mayor of Marciana decided to organize an illumination so the villagers could properly pay their respects to the empress and the King of Rome.

  Napoleon, however wasn’t holed up at the hermitage with his wife and the King of Rome, but with his mistress Marie Walewska and their young son, Alexandre. The other two people who had been seen in the rowboat were Marie Walewska’s sister and her brother, Teodor Łączyński, a Polish officer in Napoleon’s service. Colonel Łączyński had served as intermediary for the correspondence between Napoleon and Countess Walewska over the summer, and with Napoleon and Bertrand had carefully arranged her visit. They had planned for her to leave fairly quickly, before anyone learned of her arrival, but they hadn’t counted on being spotted landing at the beach so late at night.

  Some of the more curious villagers had climbed up unmarked paths to hide in the ancient chestnuts near the chapel, trying to get a glimpse of the woman they still believed to be their empress, until guards shooed them away. Napoleon decided that Marie Walewska should sail home right away before the winds calmed. Having shared only two evenings with the Walewska sisters, he rode them half of the way down to the edge of Marciana and said his goodbyes, leaving them to finish the rest of the night’s seventeen-mile ride to Porto Longone, which he’d decided was the best place from which to sail on account of rough winds at Marciana. Walewska’s visit may have been about business as much as pleasure. It was later revealed that she left with a letter from Napoleon
to Murat asking to help her with some details concerning their son’s property, and shortly after the visit she hinted that she’d played the role of courier, claiming that Napoleon “considers his exile temporary, and the information he demands is what he needs to choose the most propitious moment to bring it to an end.”

  * * *

  • • •

  CAMPBELL RETURNED TO ELBA just after Marie Walewska left. He brought news that the dey of Algiers had declared war against Naples, Genoa, and Elba and had ordered his cruisers to seize all ships sailing under those flags. The dey had also publicly declared that he would capture “the person of the Sovereign of [Elba] also, should any opportunity happily offer of getting hold of him,” a piece of information Campbell withheld from his official written report to Bertrand, who was already jumpy, since two Barbary corsairs had been spotted off the coast a few days earlier and were only scared off after the Inconstant went out on patrol, manned as fully as possible, guns at the ready.

  Napoleon sent for Campbell to visit him at the citadel of Porto Longone. Campbell figured he was hiding out there because of the corsair sighting and some new rumors of an impending assassination attempt, but Bertrand had set the Porto Longone itinerary long beforehand so that Napoleon could attend the town’s feast day. Still, the soldiers were on the alert, after a report circulated that someone had paid a one-eyed Jew from Leipzig a huge sum to murder Napoleon and that the man had already landed at Portoferraio. The mayor of Rio Alta, who had lost an eye, was subjected to harsh interrogation, but in the end the spectral one-eyed Jew was never sighted.

  Campbell and Napoleon had a three-hour interview in the citadel, the first time they had talked in several weeks. Napoleon paced back and forth, quizzing the colonel in his rapid-fire way: What were the allies planning to do about Murat in Naples? Had the British set up a regiment in Nice? Were they hanging on to Corfu? Where was the queen of Sicily at the moment? Was the king of Spain still visiting Rome? How was the pope’s health? Campbell wrote that Napoleon laughed off the recent threats from the dey of Algiers and claimed that “the Algerines were well inclined towards him and related with good humor that they had ridiculed the crews of two vessels belonging to Louis XVIII near Elba, calling to them with reproaches, ‘You have deserted your Emperor!’” The dey’s subjects, he assured Campbell, praised him as “the enemy of Russia and considered him the destroyer of Moscow.”

  He also dismissed Campbell’s revelation that allied officials knew all about his recruiting efforts along the Tuscan coast. He admitted that some Corsican officers had indeed gone there to recruit on his behalf, but reasoned that he hardly had soldiers enough to guard more than a few Elban villages, and it wasn’t as if the island offered a huge supply of skilled men for him to draw on. He asked Campbell whether the allied powers were “so weak as to be alarmed at this,” and added that it was a good thing Campbell was there as a witness to “dispel the notion.” He told Campbell that he thought of

  nothing beyond my little island. I could have kept the war going for twenty years if I had wanted that. I exist no longer for the world. I am a dead man. I occupy myself only with my family and my retirement, my house, my cows, and my mules.

  He spoke “with warmth and in strong language” about his continued separation from his wife and child and said that Marie Louise was “now absolutely a prisoner,” wrote Campbell, “for there was an Austrian officer (whom he named and described) who accompanied her, in order to prevent her from escaping to Elba.” He asked Campbell to write to Castlereagh to ask for help in bringing his family to Elba, to which Campbell answered that he only corresponded with the foreign secretary about official matters. Napoleon pressed, suggesting that maybe he could ask someone other than Castlereagh. “I bowed and told him that I should be happy to do anything agreeable to him and at the same time consistent with my duty,” wrote Campbell, which Napoleon, evidently less well versed than he was in the art of British subtlety, misinterpreted as a yes.

  Napoleon next tried to feel out what level of support he enjoyed in France, but Campbell gave him only abstract and equivocal answers to his questions. Then came more reminiscences about past battles, especially the final campaign:

  Enlarging for some time upon the influence which he possessed over the minds of French soldiers in the field, he said that under him they performed what no other chief could obtain from them. . . . With soldiers it is not so much the speech itself as the mode of delivering it [he said]. Here he raised himself on his toes, looked up to the ceiling, and lifting one of his hands to its utmost extent, called out, “Unfurl the eagles! Unfurl the eagles!” . . . It’s like music, which either speaks to the soul, or, on the contrary, gives out sounds without harmony.

  This speech ended the seven pages Campbell devoted in his journal to describing their talk at Porto Longone, which he closed by writing, “It strikes me there was something wild in his air throughout this last visit.”

  * * *

  • • •

  A FEW DAYS LATER an English colonel named Montgomery Maxwell traveled toward Elba, solely, as he put it, “with the hope of getting a peep at the great Napoleon, at present cooped up in that island.” With his young companion, a Cambridge student named John Barber Scott, and some British officers, Maxwell sailed over from Piombino in a small felucca crammed with passengers, mostly French and Italian. With the lifting of blockades, people (mainly young European men with ample means and social connections) were free to resume the practice of embarking on Grand Tours, usually through France and Italy, and sometimes Greece, as part of their cultural formations. Napoleon on Elba had become a new tourist attraction. “I’m an object of curiosity; let them satisfy themselves,” he said to Pons when he pointed out some travelers gawking at him. “They’ll go home and amuse the gentlemen by describing my acts and gestures.”

  As with anyone disembarking at Portoferraio, Maxwell’s party first had to endure the initiations of the broiling lazaretto, where they were held until their passports and bodies could be properly inspected for plague. “A more hot unwholesome locale I had never before visited,” wrote Maxwell.

  Eager for the company of his countrymen, Campbell called on Maxwell and his friends the next morning at breakfast. He told them that Napoleon was at Porto Longone and receiving no visitors but that they might be able to meet him “by accident.” He meanwhile introduced them to Bertrand and Drouot, who offered a tour of the island’s barracks and fortifications. Maxwell wrote of seeing the soldiers of the Old Guard, who “whiff their cigars and drink beer under an olive tree, and vote Portoferraio their little Paris.” While discussing Napoleon’s supposedly boundless energy, one soldier let slip that he was no longer the dynamo of past and “now took a nap in the forenoon, and gave himself up to the pleasures of the table,” but Campbell countered that any man who tried to keep up with Napoleon would surely die from fatigue.

  Maxwell and his party conspired to meet Napoleon as his carriage traveled from Porto Longone back to Portoferraio. They stayed at an inn near the citadel and hired a boy to stand watch on the terrace. That evening Maxwell saw Napoleon on horseback, about five hundred yards off, winding his way down a hill. He was in uniform and wearing his trademark bicorne hat. Maxwell recalled seeing him “pointing and giving directions to his attendants, offering to our now heated imaginations the idea that this was one of his celebrated reconnoissances on the eve of some great battle, such as Austerlitz or Borodino.”

  The romance faded when Napoleon drew alongside Maxwell and his fellow travelers, astride a horse whose dirty red saddlecloth and worn bridle gave the impression that “his majesty had a very indifferent groom.” Maxwell wrote of feeling disappointed, as

  the film seemed to fall from my eyes and the man who had been the idol of my imagination for years stood before me with a round ungraceful figure, with a most unpoetically protuberant stomach. . . . The countenance, in which I expected to behold a unison of the demon and the
soldier, appeared soft and mild in the extreme; there was nothing striking in it. . . . His complexion, too, though sallow, was not near so dark as I expected to find it.

  Only when hearing Napoleon speak did he detect the hints of greatness. “I now became enraptured with his lively bewitching air, with his astonishing memory, his information, and the fertility with which he kept up an easy and agreeable conversation,” he wrote. “No wonder French soldiers adored him, for he instantly proved to us all how well he knew how to tickle the human heart.” They spoke of Maxwell’s military service, his uniform, and of Genoa, where he was based. According to Maxwell, Napoleon “asked if the Genoese were civil to us and in a rather sly way inquired how we like the ladies, adding that they were tres complaisantes and that the men were all rogues. He then condescended to explain his meaning by informing us that one rogue made a Jew, but that it took nine Jews to make a Genoese!” Maxwell found it funny when Napoleon, on hearing that one of the British officers hailed from Kent, said, “We’re neighbors!,” forgetting “that he was by birth a Corsican and now banished from France.”

  Napoleon repeated the kinds of performance he’d so often staged for Campbell, saying that he’d totally renounced the ways of war and was of no harm to anyone. Maxwell and the British officers in his company were left so charmed by the interview that they spent the whole of dinner and well into the night talking about Napoleon and toasting his health. Maxwell left the next day, much impressed by his time with the “hardy highlander” Campbell, while his traveling partner, Scott, was less taken with the colonel, whom he allowed was “most polite” but adopted a haughty air whenever they discussed Napoleon, as though he held some special insight to his character that somehow made him superior to the emperor. “Campbell,” he wrote, “thinks Bonaparte a man of ordinary talents who has had a great deal of luck.”