by Mark Braude
The next morning Napoleon went down to the docks as though for a routine inspection of the Inconstant and some other ships. He boarded the two-hundred-ton Saint-Esprit, which Pons had chartered from a local merchant. The Caroline and the two feluccas were on their way from Rio. The flotilla would eventually comprise seven ships in all (Inconstant, Caroline, Saint-Esprit, Abeille, Étoile, Mouche, and Saint-Joseph), none of them especially fast or powerful.
The escape plans were nearly undone that night when the Partridge was spotted coming toward Portoferraio. Captain Adye had returned earlier than expected from his regular patrol route and Bertrand rushed to wake Napoleon, who ordered that the Inconstant be made ready to sail right away. But just before midnight Adye anchored about a nautical mile away from the Inconstant. Napoleon guessed that Adye wouldn’t have passed so near to Portoferraio’s guns if he suspected anything was amiss and so he canceled the order to sail and brought all work at the docks to a halt. He briefly considered trying to sink the Partridge, but opted for a more measured strategy, and at dawn Captain Chautard took the Inconstant out to sea to see if it would raise any alarms from the watchmen aboard the Partridge. Amazingly, no one on board the British ship seemed to pay much notice to the Inconstant, despite the fact that it had been repainted in the colors of one of their own merchant brigs.
The oblivious Adye disembarked at Portoferraio that morning, Friday, February 24, and dropped off a few British tourists who had asked to be taken to the island aboard the Partridge. He went to the Bertrand home for a chat. Adye told Henri that he’d heard some talk at Livorno that Napoleon was set to escape any day now. Henri joked that there were all sorts of “absurd reports” going round and “only fools” would believe them. Adye asked where Napoleon was at the moment and Henri told him he was somewhere nearby but momentarily indisposed. Fanny added that she’d walked with him the day before and she thought he’d caught a cold. They invited Adye to dinner but he said he wanted to make sail that night. Right before he left, Henri made sure to mention that Napoleon had just sent the Inconstant off to Livorno for repairs and told Adye about its grounding a few weeks earlier.
Adye walked around the town for a while and saw soldiers turning the soil and planting shrubs in their barracks gardens. At two that afternoon, he put out toward Palmaiola, which he’d yet to inspect, but not before Filidoro, the portmaster, had repeated the story that the Inconstant was headed off for repairs.
The Oil Merchant had seen Adye walking in Portoferraio, but left him alone because he was by that time convinced that the British were behind Napoleon’s impending escape. “One can’t take a step without being noticed,” he wrote in his report to Mariotti. “Today everyone is speaking quite plainly about a departure. I begin to be convinced that it is probable.” Rather than trying any bold move, he walked down to the customs house and requested permission to sail the following day in his fishing boat. Filidoro denied his request and took his passport without explaining why he did so. “I begged, I offered bribes, I made promises,” wrote the Oil Merchant, “but to no effect.” All fishermen had been barred from sailing out to open waters, and no ships were allowed to dock. Campbell’s Elban contact Ricci had meanwhile been trying to get Adye a message detailing all the recent and suspicious activity, but failed to reach him in time.
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TOWER OF BABEL
EVERYWHERE ONE LOOKED, people were packing up their goods or saying tearful goodbyes or squeezing in some last bit of revelry. The cafés overflowed. Soldiers were patrolling all across the island, everyone on edge. “I seem to have been transported this morning into a Tower of Babel,” wrote the Oil Merchant. “Here, someone laments the loss of the soldiers; there someone cries about the loss of some cherished possession; someone else is busy building castles in Spain.” He couldn’t persuade any of the local fishermen to try ferrying him quietly to Piombino, regardless of what price he offered.
Napoleon had made no official declaration and stayed shut away at the Mulini, writing the proclamations he intended to distribute on landing in France while a printer’s devil waited on hand to rush them into production. He summoned Peyrusse and told him to set aside some money for the few soldiers who would be left behind under the leadership of Dr. Lapi, the commandant of the Elban Guard, who would act as governor after Napoleon was gone.
At midday on February 25 the Partridge was spotted yet again. Adye hadn’t returned to Livorno the night before as he’d told Bertrand he would, likely because the winds hadn’t been in his favor. While it remained anchored some distance from Portoferraio, Napoleon had the guns at the fort trained on the ship with the order to fire if Adye tried to enter the harbor. But that evening Adye made sail again for Livorno, trying to take advantage of some strong northwesterly winds.
Napoleon for the first time told Bertrand, Drouot, and Cambronne in full detail the plan for escape. They would sail to Antibes and land at the small beach there, Golfe-Juan. Landing at Marseille would have offered a straight shot to Paris through relatively easy terrain, but Napoleon wanted to avoid the port and surrounding area, which was staunchly royalist. From Antibes they would march through the Dauphiné province (encompassing the present-day departments of Isère, Drôme, and Haute-Alps), which would mean hard treks through winding mountain passes, but would allow them to bypass Provence, where they had received such a violent welcome on the way to Fréjus the previous spring.
Napoleon liked to say that France needed him more than he needed France, but his plan to sail there rather than for the much closer target Italy suggests the opposite. He was betting that the French people would rally to his side at the sight of him and that any deserters from the Bourbon forces could come more quickly and directly over to him than if he landed on the Italian peninsula. An Italian landing was the relatively safer option, but what would be the symbolic reward of risking everything only to land among Italians, and not much closer to the Tuileries than he’d been on Elba?
Napoleon knew that as soon as Captain Adye reached Livorno he would tell Campbell what he’d seen and between them they would figure things out and raise the alarm. The flotilla would have to leave as soon as possible and sail quickly. Each ship needed to be as light as could be, meaning no materiel should be on board unless absolutely vital. The same went for men.
Under Napoleon’s rule the French had never rivaled the British as a sea power, and he was no great naval strategist. But he’d enjoyed a few thrilling feats at sea, for instance, when trading on lightness and the element of surprise to slip past the British fleet undetected on the return from Egypt, a small personal victory after the tremendous French naval losses at the battle of the Nile. Now the entire success of his operation would depend on skill and luck on the open ocean. If the flotilla encountered resistance at sea, it wouldn’t have the option of turning back to a safe port, since as soon as the escape became known, French and British ships were sure to rush to be the first to seize the poorly defended island.
If reaching France proved impossible, the plan was for the flotilla to make for Corsica, where Napoleon and his troops could hide out in the mountains. He anticipated that between his soldiers and the population of Corsica, which would surely come over to his side, they could hold the island indefinitely. To make provision for this option Napoleon arranged for three feluccas—each holding fifteen or sixteen influential Corsicans recruited specially for the mission, and carrying plenty of powder, food, and water—to leave shortly after the main flotilla. They were to sow disorder, capture Governor Bruslart, fly the tricolor, and establish a junta government. They would then raise troops from among the Corsicans and send them to Golfe-Juan, where they would form a rear guard for the landing party, which would by then be marching for Paris.
A few months earlier some Corsican soldiers who had snuck off to serve Napoleon on Elba had returned home, complaining that they had been mistreated by the emperor and that they had seen the error of their ways. In reality they had
served as a kind of sleeper cell, loyal to Napoleon and ready to be activated if and when the time for escape presented itself. In February they had sent word to Napoleon that Corsica teetered on the edge of a general uprising and that the coup he envisioned could be carried off easily. Unknown to anyone in Napoleon’s camp was that a few days earlier Bruslart had written from Bastia to warn General Dupont that rebels camped out in the mountains threatened his control over Corsica and that there were reports from around the island of attacks on gendarmes and other officials. “I have reason to believe that Elban insurgents are behind this uprising,” he wrote.
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THE FINAL EVENING AT THE MULINI was a quiet one. Napoleon played cards with his mother and sister. Pauline, in tears, went into one of the other rooms, where the valet Marchand had been listening in on the family’s conversation. She pressed a diamond necklace into Marchand’s hands, telling him to sell it to raise money for the coming campaign. When she said adieu to Marchand he said he hoped it would instead be au revoir, implying that they would all be reunited soon enough, she answered, “That’s not how I see it.”
Napoleon took a moonlit stroll on the terrace with his mother, who would later recall telling him that “if Heaven intends that you shall die, my son, and has spared you in this time of ignominious exile, I hope you will not perish by poison but with your sword in your hand!” On Saint Helena, Napoleon said that despite her lifelong reluctance to part with even the smallest amount of money, his mother would have “doomed herself to live on brown bread” to help him. Before retiring for the night Napoleon distracted himself with a book, a life of Emperor Charles V of Austria, which he left open on his desk, alongside a few bits of scribbled paper torn into shreds.
It was a difficult night for Henri Bertrand. He was worried the landing would throw France into civil war, though Napoleon had tried to calm him by promising not to seek harsh revenge against his former enemies once he returned to power. Fanny and the children would be staying at Portoferraio so that they could later travel with Madame Mère to Rome and then on to Paris, once they received word that it was safe to do so. Henri wrote to his father to explain his reasons for continuing to serve alongside Napoleon rather than staying behind with his family. On Elba, he wrote eliptically, “there was, on my part, only sacrifices; no future. I couldn’t do it any longer.”
Just before the sailing Henri hid a letter among Fanny’s things so that she would only discover it after he was gone. It said that if the landing in France wasn’t “crowned with success” she should stay with her father’s family in England for as long as was needed, but should return to France as soon as she could. “Our children cannot and must never cease to be French,” he wrote. “Consult my father on their education, their fortune. . . . Be brave, you owe it to your children. Until the final moment of my life you will be the object of my sweetest and most tender affection.” The letter, discovered years later, had the creases to show that someone had crumpled it up into a tight ball.
Henri later recalled how worried he’d been that his headstrong wife would ignore his instructions to stay at Portoferraio until she heard from him again and that she would instead make her own way to France to rejoin him more quickly. He’d pictured her and the children on some tiny boat sailing for Marseille where they would all be arrested.
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EVERYTHING WAS QUIET AT ELBA
ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 26, Campbell sighted the Partridge just beyond Livorno’s harbor, where it was becalmed for several hours because of slack wind. He wrote to Castlereagh to say he thought that Napoleon would escape at any moment and then turned to his journal to plan out a course of action. Approaching the situation methodically, he reasoned that Napoleon would likely land at Piombino, the closest Italian port, and that he’d already arranged a pact with Murat, who must have learned that the delegates in Vienna were set to denounce his rule in Naples and so had teamed with his brother-in-law to “throw down the gauntlet in defiance of the sovereigns of Europe.”
Next he resolved that if the Partridge encountered Napoleon’s ships (he was certain that even Napoleon wasn’t bold enough to try escaping in a single ship) and if these carried troops, military stores, and provisions, then he and Captain Adye would be compelled “to intercept, and in case of their offering the slightest resistance, to destroy them.” With eighteen guns and a crew of ninety, the ship was a decent match for the similarly sized Inconstant. Perhaps anticipating that his journal might be seized by the enemy, or even serve as evidence for his own court-martial, he wrote that he and Adye would
be justified by our sovereign, our country, and the world, in proceeding to any extremity upon our own responsibility in a case of so extraordinary a nature. I shall feel that in the execution of my duty, and with the military means which I can procure, the lives of this restless man and his misguided associates and followers are not to be put in competition with the fate of thousands and the tranquility of the world.
At noon, the Partridge finally docked at Livorno. It had taken Adye eighteen hours to tack up from Elba. In response to Campbell’s flurry of questions, he said that he hadn’t seen or heard anything on Elba to give them cause for concern. He’d been chatting breezily with the Bertrands at their home just two days earlier, he said, and he’d seen soldiers carrying earth to their barracks and planting shrubs. While he hadn’t seen Napoleon, Fanny Bertrand had mentioned walking with him. (Campbell, in recording Adye’s comments, revealed how close he’d grown to the half-British Fanny Bertrand, noting that her statement must have been true, since she “would neither be made the tool of covering his departure, nor is she capable of dissembling her uneasiness, if such circumstance had taken place.”)
Adye told Campbell everything he’d done after leaving Portoferraio: Bertrand had told him there would be no issue with his landing at Palmaiola and so he’d headed there to investigate, but variable weather kept him from getting near enough before dark, so he lay to for the night of February 24. The next morning he was refused a berth by the portmaster, who said he’d just received an order from Napoleon not to allow any person to land, though he gave no reason why. Adye elected to keep sailing north, less bothered by the incident at Palmaiola than he was by the light winds that threatened to keep him from reaching Campbell in time for their appointment. Making his way from Palmaiola to Livorno brought the Partridge back in sight of Portoferraio, he said, which gave him a chance to see again that “everything was quiet at Elba.” At last evening’s sunset he’d seen the “topmasts of the Inconstant within the harbor.”
Campbell brought Adye up to speed with all the distressing intelligence he’d gathered while he was away and then asked if now he thought there might be anything more worth mentioning, even if “it might not at the time have attracted his notice.”
Adye absorbed this information. Yes, come to think of it, General Bertrand had been very persistent in asking him about his exact movements and probable return, and he’d told him his schedule in detail. And it was confusing, he admitted, that while Bertrand and the portmaster told him the Inconstant was heading to Livorno, some other officers said the ship was going to Genoa, while the movements of the Inconstant itself were unusual because on Friday morning he’d seen it heading northward, but later in the day he saw it sailing southward, hugging the Italian coast, and then a few hours later, after he’d left Portoferraio and turned into the channel of Piombino, he passed the Inconstant again, but this time heading back toward Portoferraio alongside two smaller ships that appeared hastily manned. He admitted to Campbell that he couldn’t see any logical reason why that trio of ships should have been out sailing. Campbell figured that Napoleon had sent the smaller boats out precisely so they could spot the Partridge and relay that news back to the Inconstant so the escape could be delayed.
Campbell and Adye prepared to head back to Portoferraio but were kept in port by the calm weather. The supersti
tious Adye whistled to bring wind but without any luck.
Campbell returned to his journal:
I think he will leave General Bertrand to defend Portoferraio, as he has a wife and several children with him to whom he is extremely attached, and probably Napoleon will not communicate his intention to him until the last moment. But he will certainly take with him General Cambronne (a desperate, uneducated ruffian, who was a drummer with him in Egypt) and those of his Guards upon whom he can most depend, embarking them on board the Inconstant, the Étoile, and two other vessels, while he himself probably, with General Drouot, will precede them in the Caroline. The place of disembarkation will be Gaeta, on the coast of Naples, or Civita Vecchia, if Murat has previously advanced to Rome. For I cannot persuade myself that Napoleon will commit himself openly, until the former has moved forward with his troops; but it is very likely that they will endeavour to have an interview immediately at Pianosa or Montecristo.
As with Mariotti, Talleyrand, and other officials, Campbell remained fixated on Italy because he thought Murat to be Napoleon’s last potential ally and that Napoleon believed he could bring over Italian insurrectionists to his cause by landing in Tuscany and promising them that together they would drive out the Austrians. Campbell had likely also been misled by Napoleon’s feigned interest in Italian liberation during their talks together.
