The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  After making these fiery statements Napoleon again tried to reassure Campbell that he was only speaking hypothetically and without any “personal motives or expectations.” He repeated his refrain about being retired from the world of politics and war, saying:

  I am a dead man. I was born a soldier. I have mounted the throne and I have descended. I am ready for everything. They can send me away. They can assassinate me. I’ll stick out my chest to receive the dagger. As General Bonaparte I gained much, but they have taken it all away.

  Despite these troubling signs, Campbell described Napoleon as seemingly at peace with his current situation and far less active than he’d been only a few months earlier:

  He has four places of residence in different parts of the island, and the improvements and changes of these form his sole occupation. But as they lose their interest to his unsettled mind, and the novelty wears off, he occasionally falls into a state of inactivity never known before, and has of late retired to his bedroom for repose during several hours of the day. If he takes exercise, it is in a carriage, and not on horseback as before. His health, however, is excellent, and his spirits appear not at all depressed. I begin to think he is quite resigned to his retreat, and that he is tolerably happy, excepting when the recollections of his former power are freshened by sentiments of vanity or revenge, or his passions become influenced by want of money, and his wife and child being kept from him.

  Meanwhile, Henri Bertrand, who did have his wife and children with him, also seemed tolerably happy with life on Elba, though he and Fanny struggled to care for their sickly son, born just a few days after Fanny had reached Portoferraio. An inexperienced local pharmacist had mishandled the birth and the Bertrands had kept mostly to themselves since then, although Fanny never turned away any callers.

  The ascetic Drouot was apparently happiest of all. He wrote to a colleague in France:

  We’ve made it through the hot season, which the locals say is the hottest one they’ve had in many years. I haven’t been inconvenienced by the weather in the least. In fact it’s been a long time since I’ve passed such an agreeable summer. I continue to lead the life of an anchorite, but for me this life holds the greatest of charms. It’s impossible to be happier. I wake at five or six and take care of my governor’s duties until nine, and then I breakfast. From ten to three I study the sciences, and then I dine. From six to eight I walk, and then I read. At nine I get into bed and read some more. I’m enjoying the best health, am well-liked by all those around me, and you of course know about my situation here.

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  THE VULGAR DETAILS OF MARRIED LIVES

  NAPOLEON HAD IN MANY ways tried to distance himself from his Corsican past during his rise to the head of France, but now after a few months in exile he began surrounding himself with a new inner circle of Corsicans, some with long-standing family connections to the Bonapartes. They knew the region and local customs, but were still outsiders without the deep ties to Elba that might lead them to confuse their loyalties. Napoleon had Corsicans running the secret police, manning the palace gates and the ports, and handling the mail. The Corsican Santini, who after several months had finally found work at the Mulini as a kind of guard for the palace papers, seems to have played some role within this new entourage, and may have traveled to the neighboring island as a secret agent. Years later, Santini would number among the seventy-six individual beneficiaries named in Napoleon’s will, nineteen of whom had joined him on Elba for the exile.

  Another reminder of Napoleon’s past arrived in the form of Pauline, who reached Portoferraio on October 31 after a stay at their sister Caroline’s villa near Vesuvius. She passed out candies as she disembarked. At her welcome ball the following evening musicians greeted her entrance with a popular tune from a sentimental opera, “Où peut-on être mieux qu’au sein de sa famille?” (Where can one be better than in the bosom of one’s family?) Pons wandered over to have the band play the “Marseillaise,” sparking a good-natured chuckle from Napoleon, who had once officially disowned the republican anthem.

  Pons found Pauline a bit overdramatic, something of a hypochondriac, and not necessarily as bright as the rest of her siblings, but she was so “full of gaiety” and so clearly kindhearted that he came to think of her as “a consoling angel . . . the most precious treasure of the palace.” She was installed in what would have been Marie Louise’s rooms and her arrival brought a final end to the renovations, since the palace would be devoted primarily to entertaining from then on. Pons wrote that Portoferraio “lit up” with her presence. There were more masked balls, more dances, and more plays, usually performed by local youths who made audiences laugh with their ineptitude. None of the Elban families felt compelled to host a soirée, since the calendar was so full of events hosted by Napoleon or his sister.

  With Pauline’s arrival the atmosphere at the Mulini instantly felt less “martial,” as the valet Marchand recalled. She enjoyed fine displays and grand entrances. She “always dressed most carefully,” recalled another valet, “Ali” (Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis), “in the style of a young girl of eighteen,” though she’d just turned thirty-four, and she “had all the beautiful proportions of the Venus di Medici.” Citing her fragile health, exacerbated by the unruly climate, Pauline liked to have the valets carry her up or down stairs while she was seated atop a velvet pillow, and she preferred to take in the sights by sedan chair rather than by carriage.

  Ali admired how she “always found some way to escape being at divine service.” Yet she respected the Mulini’s strict court etiquette, performing a deep curtsy like everyone else if she passed her brother in one of the narrow halls or staircases. Once, when her black velvet dress displeased Napoleon, she went immediately to change, and the same thing happened a few days later when she wore a ghostly white dress, because something about it reminded Napoleon too much of the 1790s craze for dressing à la victime, when French fashionistas had playfully imitated the looks of people executed at the hands of the Revolution with scarlet chokers around their necks, or hair cut short where a guillotine blade would have hit.

  Some of Napoleon’s contemporaries, including one French minister in a letter to Talleyrand, suggested that the charged relationship between brother and sister turned incestuous on Elba. While the evidence supporting such claims is tenuous, it does seem that Pauline acted as a kind of procurer, arranging for paid companions to visit Napoleon, the system apparently organized through little notes. A Spanish woman, married to one of Napoleon’s Polish lancers and renowned for the way she danced the fandango, was among those who reportedly participated in this arrangement on Elba.

  Pauline seemed to be more at ease when she was away from her brother at the Saint-Cloud property, where, as Pons wrote, she “seized any chance to multiply her pleasures,” and was often seen in the company of an amorous officer named Loubers. She liked to dance with Cambronne, who couldn’t keep up with her, and to flirt with the devout Drouot. As Peyrusse recalled, her “presence was a source of pleasure and enjoyment for the Emperor’s court, for the women of the town, and for the garrison.” In short, life was not altogether unpleasant for her or for the members of her retinue. “I would be happy to live at Portoferraio, the town seems to me a little Paris,” wrote one of Pauline’s attendants. “There are fine grenadiers and handsome Poles on horseback. One would think one hadn’t left France.” But Pauline recognized that the idyll couldn’t last forever and to her the situation felt as unsettled as the mercurial climate. “There are great winds here,” she wrote from Elba, “the weather is very changeable. I enjoy being with my brother, but I am anxious for the future.”

  Having his sister and mother nearby would have been a great comfort for Napoleon, who had been raised by an extended family of women, which included an aunt, two grandmothers, and a nursemaid, all overseen by the young widow Letizia. “Elsewhere they see you rich, noble, or learned,” he once said, “but in Corsica you brag abou
t your relatives. They are what make a man praiseworthy or feared.” Their presence at Portoferraio elicited memories of their old Ajaccio home on Saint Charles Street. One night at the Mulini, Napoleon remembered the time Madame Mère had caught him and his sister imitating one of their wizened grandmothers, who was “bent . . . like an old fairy.” Letizia had only punished Pauline, since it was “easier to pull up skirts than undo breeches,” as Napoleon put it, though he was the older sibling by eleven years.

  Pauline’s arrival would have helped Napoleon financially as well. She’d started selling off her properties out of a presentiment that the Bourbons would sequester them without compensation, since she hadn’t seen any sign of her own state pension, promised, as with Napoleon’s, by the Treaty of Fontainebleau. She sold her place on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré to the British government and it was turned over to the Duke of Wellington to use as ambassador to Louis XVIII’s court.

  * * *

  • • •

  DOMESTIC LIFE AT PORTOFERRAIO was not all joyful that autumn. The Bertrands’ infant son died just a few weeks after Pauline’s arrival. Napoleon encouraged the grieving Fanny to walk the grounds at San Martino. She’d been a regular guest at the original Saint-Cloud, where she often rode for pleasure, and he thought she might find some comfort in this ersatz Elban version. Eventually he was able to visit with her and became a frequent guest at the Bertrand home at the Biscotteria. Afternoons Napoleon and Fanny went off in his carriage or out on his rowboat, sometimes accompanied by young Napoleon Bertrand, the couple’s eldest child, who enjoyed playing at wooden swords with his namesake. French agents learning of this closeness assumed the relationship between Napoleon and Fanny was strictly platonic. Though she often dined at the Mulini without her husband, she was always seen returning home directly after the meal’s end. She sometimes brought her children along to the meals and Napoleon made sure they left with sweetmeats and candies.

  During the final exile Henri would allude in his diary to Napoleon’s making advances on Fanny, which sometimes left her in tears. “Give her another child,” Napoleon told him, at a point when Fanny was so desperate to leave Saint Helena that she bordered on the edge of madness. “That will postpone your departure for a year, and will also give her something to interest her.” He seems to have been fascinated by Henri’s devotion to the elegant Fanny. “What love!” he said of the couple. “I’ve never seen anything like it!” Perhaps with her aristocratic Martinique upbringing and blood ties to Joséphine, Fanny reminded him too much of his former wife. In the last feverish days of his life Napoleon told Bertrand that he “held it against” Fanny for not having become his mistress.

  After the death of his son, Henri would do most of his work from home and went to the Mulini only when summoned, which Napoleon took as an insult. On Saint Helena he claimed that Henri had been of little use to him on Elba, since “he was always with his wife and children.” But in fact he was vital to Elba’s government. Each new idea Napoleon wanted to put into action first passed through him, and Henri reworked his off-the-cuff dictation into readable prose, sometimes annotating for clarity or making suggestions. The valets got used to hearing the shouted insults that such advice could prompt. More than once, while Napoleon was mid-rant, they would see Bertrand walking out of the room, his face as red as wine.

  Pons thought that these bouts were merely the natural result of putting two men of such vastly different temperaments in close quarters, bound together by circumstance rather than true friendship. He was sure that Bertrand couldn’t have been too pleased by the types of mundane assignments he was given on Elba. The grand marshal struck him as a decent and hardworking man, compromised in Napoleon’s eyes because of his sentimental attachment to Fanny, a coupling that apparently thrilled him as much as it disturbed him. But then Napoleon, wrote Pons, had always shown “too great a liking for finding out the vulgar details of married lives.”

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  DON GIOVANNI, CINDERELLA, AND UNDINE

  MARIE LOUISE’S TIME AT the spa came to an end after Talleyrand advised Metternich that “it would suit us both if her stay at Aix was not prolonged.” When she crossed the French border on September 7, leaving her adopted country for the last time, her traveling companions saw no great display of emotion.

  She reached Lausanne, where the Princess of Wales happened to be passing through, and Marie Louise invited her to dine. There was a post-meal duet from Don Giovanni with Neipperg on piano. Marie Louise timidly sang soprano as Zerlina, fighting off seduction by the titular libertine, while the Princess of Wales belted out Don Giovanni’s plaintive baritone. The latter, wrote Méneval, “sang with a voice of which I will say nothing except that it really showed this princess’s courage.”

  A few days later, Marie Louise reached the town of Küssnacht abutting the shore of Lake Zug. They headed up a narrow mountain path that led to a chapel devoted to William Tell and passed the spot where Tell’s arrow pierced and killed the hated Austrian overlord Gessler. Waylaid by a huge mountain storm, Marie Louise, Neipperg, and the rest of the party had to spend the night at the Golden Sun inn nearby. Just before bed, Marie Louise dismissed the footman who normally stood watch at the door of her bedroom. Méneval occupied the neighboring room. A short while later, Méneval wrote to his wife, “I can no longer fool myself that she is the pure and spotless angel whom I held above reproach.”

  She reached Vienna on October 7, having just missed the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi, her father’s name day, perhaps on purpose. The Bonaparte coat of arms was removed from the panels of her carriages as soon as she was out of sight. She was to be addressed as Archduchess, never as Empress, and her son, whose full name was Napoléon François Charles Joseph Bonaparte, was to be referred to as Franz. Courtiers were instructed to spare her any mention of her husband’s name. Metternich allowed a few of Napoleon’s messages to reach her, but only after they had been properly vetted. Neipperg was formally named as her chamberlain.

  When duty required, she would receive dignitaries who were in Vienna for the congress, among them Tsar Alexander, but she avoided the nightly feasts and dances, so full of malicious talk. People called her Madame Neipperg behind her back. One night she watched from behind glass as a carnival party unfolded with tumblers, musicians, torchbearers, cavalrymen, and diplomats arriving in golden sleighs, filing into the palace to be treated to an enormous feast and a performance of Cinderella. People talked about her as if she were a nun, she told a friend. The police inspector tasked with monitoring her movements in Vienna requested a change of assignment.

  She saw little benefit in continuing to play the public role of royalty. She practiced her guitar and read her books. She took her son to the palace Tiergarten, the oldest zoo in the world, to see the bears and buffalo and kangaroos from New Holland. She played at billiards and called on Neipperg when it pleased her. She worked at translating from French to German the fairytale novella Undine, which tells the story of a water nymph who marries a dashing knight to gain a soul. Tossed aside by her spouse for a less mysterious human woman, she returns to kill him with a poison kiss as he sleeps beside his new love.

  * * *

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH POLITICAL IN its origin and focus, the Vienna conference was also one of the greatest social events of the nineteenth century. Giddy at the prospect of creating a new era of lasting peace, the delegates and their hangers-on transformed the Austrian capital into the site of a nonstop bacchanal (although Castlereagh complained about the lack of decent wine). They went through six hundred rations of coffee a day, kept in enormous kettles, and made use of the fourteen hundred horses and three hundred carriages, many built specially for the event, that Francis had put at their disposal. Noting the prodigious spending on all things gastronomic, an Austrian agent remarked that Francis had discovered “a new way to wage war: eat your enemy.”

  The treasury was already overstretched; t
he Austrians had fought France more often and at greater expense over the past twenty years than any other power except Britain. But Francis recognized the value in being seen as Europe’s most magnanimous host and, hopefully, its prime peacemaker. And all the socializing served a larger aim. People of different nations and dynastic houses were forced to spend a lot of time together, often sleeping under the same roof, and political matters were discussed in informal settings, on hunts and over meals, which lessened the chance of some kind of blowup that might result in a duel, or diplomatic incident.

  Entitled by the treaties of Fontainebleau and Paris to take up her position as Duchess of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, Marie Louise had yet to be allowed to claim these Italian territories. The Spanish and French contingents at Vienna were working to have the lands given to the Spanish infanta, Maria Luisa, queen of Etruria, whose claim stemmed from a complicated set of territorial exchanges involving Spain and France during Napoleon’s rule. Francis was meanwhile secretly trying to have his daughter’s claim deferred for as long as possible. He wanted to keep her from taking power in lands so close to Elba, where her presence might stir up Italian nationalists looking to drive the Austrians out of Tuscany and turn their disparate lands from “a mere geographic expression” (as Metternich described Italy) into a sovereign nation, perhaps with Marie Louise as queen and an escaped Napoleon and Murat as military commanders. Metternich, who had helped secure these lands for Marie Louise in the first place, now counseled her to be satisfied with the rights and pensions afforded to her as an Austrian archduchess and ask for nothing more. “Each day there was a fresh story,” wrote Méneval. “Today Parma was assured to her, on the morrow it had been given to somebody else.”