The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  Campbell wrote to Captain Thomson, the senior officer at Genoa, where a line-of-battle ship, a frigate, and a brig were in port, advising him to detach the ships to take immediate possession of Pianosa and Palmaiola. That way if British ships caught Napoleon in open waters, he couldn’t claim that he’d only gone to visit Pianosa or Palmaiola and been blown off course on the way back toward Elba.

  Campbell and Adye were kept at Livorno through the night. They discussed what they do would once they finally reached Portoferraio. Campbell wanted to dock and request a formal interview with Bertrand, after which he would remain on board the Partridge to survey all ships going in and out, waiting to see how his request would be answered, while hopefully being able to communicate with some of the French men-of-war patrolling the waters. Adye predicted they would be seized as soon as the Partridge was anchored.

  { 43 }

  INCONSTANT

  NAPOLEON WOKE EARLY on Sunday, February 26, a bright blue morning. He would have heard the shouts of “Long Live the Emperor!” from the crowd that had gathered outside the Mulini. A soft breeze carried the scent of freshly turned loam and citrus.

  As on any Sunday at the palace, courtiers pressed in to watch Napoleon being dressed during the levee, the traditional waking ceremony. He took special care selecting each item of clothing and accessory, opting for a dark blue coat with scarlet cuffs and white lapels, adorned with the Legion of Honor and the Iron Crown of Italy, complemented by a black silk stock collar, white waistcoat, white knee breeches of fine wool, and white silk stockings. The Elban emblem on his black beaver hat had been replaced with the tricolor cockade.

  During the levee Napoleon made the first public statement that he would be leaving Elba, though he wouldn’t reveal where he was going. “I leave you peace,” he said. “I leave you prosperity. I leave you a clean, fair city. I leave you my roads and trees, for which your children at least will thank me.” Pons thought he looked tired, as though he’d aged a decade overnight.

  At nine Napoleon attended mass at the little church near the harbor and then performed the customary review of the Elban National Guard in the town square. After the drills a few of the Elbans were posted to the Mulini to replace the regular palace guards. At noon the drums sounded to call an assembly, during which Drouot told the soldiers to continue their work as normal, including tending their gardens, and to return to barracks at three for final preparations. They were to dress themselves as if for battle.

  This was the first time any of the soldiers heard from a trusted source that they would in fact be leaving Elba. None of them had any idea what the coming campaign would require of them or where it would take place. There had been no additional training to prime the troops for battle. An officer rushed to find Drouot to ask if he could bring his wife along on the journey. Drouot told him to follow his orders as he received them.

  Napoleon had by then sent a message to Murat, requesting that he send out a squadron to cruise around Elba in case his flotilla needed to retreat toward Naples. He stopped short of asking his brother-in-law to escort his ships to their destination, probably because he was counting on the dramatic visual effect of landing with his own small fleet flying the tricolor. (Murat would wait until early March to send off his naval squadron, by which point Napoleon had already landed.)

  * * *

  • • •

  ON SEEING THAT SHIPS were preparing to sail, the Oil Merchant figured the time had come for him to leave, with or without his passport. He bribed a fisherman to get him across to the mainland, but they were stopped by the crew of the Inconstant as soon as they tried to leave the harbor and were threatened with arrest. After returning to shore the Oil Merchant rode toward Rio hoping to find someone else to get him off the island but found his path blocked by patrolling soldiers. He went back to Portoferraio to wait things out, taking a difficult and twisting route to avoid meeting any more soldiers. But back near the harbor he was spotted by Cambronne, who remembered him from his landing and a few encounters in town. Recalling that the man had spoken of his military connections, Cambronne thought that he now numbered among the people leaving with Napoleon and barked at him to go find his place on the appropriate ship. Luckily a nearby French officer with whom he’d become friendly intervened on the Oil Merchant’s behalf after the latter explained that he would trail the flotilla in his own boat as soon as he had settled all his outstanding accounts on the island, a story that satisfied the distracted Cambronne.

  At around two, a sailor returning from patrol passed beneath the Mulini in his rowboat to give the all clear. Guards had already shut the town gates. Pauline joked to an officer that “tonight’s ball has been cancelled by history.” Pons was summoned to the palace, thinking he was going to be named governor to replace Drouot. Instead Napoleon told him to prepare to sail in a few hours at his side aboard the Inconstant. He wasn’t allowed to bring his family. Dr. Lapi was named as de facto governor, with the order “to cede to no one, and fight until death.”

  Napoleon burned some of his personal papers. A few crumpled scraps of writing in his hand were found on the floor of the Mulini’s study, which later sparked speculation that he had tried at some point during the exile to draft his memoirs.

  At seven that evening, in his gray traveling coat, Napoleon took his last ride down from the Mulini and through the Water Gate to the harbor. He had borrowed his sister’s carriage, which would be loaded onto the Inconstant, and traveled at the slow pace of the soldiers who marched alongside, without any music or fanfare until they reached the marina. Drouot, Peyrusse, and Pons numbered among those on foot. Bertrand rode on horseback.

  In a repeat of the welcome they had given him the previous May, the people of Portoferraio placed candles in their windows to illuminate the harbor. Mayor Traditi, struggling for eloquence as badly as he had on Napoleon’s landing, broke down in tears and abandoned his efforts.

  The prevailing sound at the harbor that night, wrote Pons, “was sobbing all around.” Officials distributed a proclamation, signed in the name of the new governor, Dr. Lapi:

  Elbans! Our august sovereign, recalled by Providence in the pursuit of glory, shall quit our island. . . . “I am leaving,” he said, “I have been extremely pleased by the people’s conduct; I trust them with the defense of this land to which I attached the highest value; I cannot give them any greater proof of my trust in them than to leave my mother and sister under their watch.”

  The soldiers boarded the Inconstant and the six smaller boats. Peyrusse was on the Saint-Esprit, completing some final business with its captain and owner, who had offered his services but had yet to name his rate. Peyrusse had barely slept, having spent the night “in violent agitation” struggling to make enough room in his suitcase for anything besides his accounting registers. He was looking over the ship’s books to help him negotiate a fair price, while some of the Polish lancers tossed everything deemed nonessential into the bay, eliciting curses from the captain. Peyrusse looked up from the ledgers to see Napoleon, who had been rowed out to the ship to see about the delay. Napoleon grabbed the papers, threw them in the air, and yelled at Peyrusse to pay the captain whatever he wanted and be done with it. Peyrusse handed the captain twenty-five thousand francs.

  As the sun was setting around eight o’clock, Napoleon was rowed to the Inconstant and boarded, which was marked by a single cannon shot. The plan was to wait for darkness before sailing, both to avoid being spotted by enemy patrols and so that no one on Elba would later be able to report whether the flotilla had headed south or north from Portoferraio. The ships couldn’t have left just then in any case, since they needed a strong southeasterly wind to get out of the roadstead and pull clear of the island. Nor’easters were far more common that time of year, and this had been a particularly calm week.

  The seven ships sat unmoving for two more hours. Despite all the effort to streamline, they were still dangerously heavy. They carried
four guns, ammunition, and a million francs in bullion. Six hundred members of Napoleon’s Old Guard were on the Inconstant, which was so jammed that there was hardly place for everyone to stand on the decks. Just under five hundred more soldiers and eighty civilians, mostly servants, were split among the other ships. Even with all the materiel they carried, Napoleon’s ships would likely be outmatched by any British or French warships encountered, which would have more guns but still be faster because their crews would be several times smaller.

  The seven boats were still bobbing in the water as the first stars appeared. The troops bolstered themselves by singing the “Marseillaise,” the song of liberty, again and again, lit by a slim crescent moon. They still hadn’t been told where they were heading.

  By midnight, it seemed suicidal to stay in the harbor any longer. The boats were rowed out to open waters at an agonizing clip so that the captains could try their luck with the winds out in the roadstead. Finally a breeze started to carry them northwest. Whatever minuscule lead Napoleon had calculated on having against the Partridge was diminishing by the hour.

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  AT SEA

  NAPOLEON’S FLOTILLA WAS ONLY five leagues from Elba when the sun came up over Portoferraio. It took until noon before the crowds gathered at points along the coast saw the last of the sails disappear over the horizon.

  The ships would head straight north from Portoferraio, keeping clear of Livorno and the Tuscan coast to avoid arousing suspicion during the first leg of the journey, since so many trading fleets regularly crossed the waters between Corsica and Livorno in all directions. To look less conspicuous they sailed single file, each separated by a few kilometers of blue; the Inconstant led the way, gaining some speed after one of its rowboats was jettisoned.

  Just as the Inconstant rounded the northwest coast of the island of Capraia by backing and filling, a midshipman on watch called out. What was soon identified as the French battleship Melpomène (named for the muse of tragedy) was sailing off the port side, navigating the narrow channel separating Capraia from Corsica. The crew of the Inconstant had yet to discover that another French patrol ship, the forty-four-gun Fleur de Lys, was meanwhile sailing just to the north near the small island of Gorgona. Captained by a die-hard royalist, it carried more than two hundred sailors. A third French ship, the brig Zéphir, was also nearby to the northeast, heading for Livorno on its usual patrol, but still yet to be spotted.

  The flotilla muddled along in light wind under a cloudless sky. At midday the topsails of another ship came into sight, rocking in the distance some fifteen miles to the east. Napoleon and his officers rightly guessed that this was the Partridge, carrying Adye and Campbell. The British sloop traveled at a much faster clip than their own.

  By early afternoon Napoleon was convinced that Adye and Campbell had sighted his flotilla and he opted to press on northward to try his luck against the Melpomène rather than ease off and risk facing the Partridge. There was a chance the Melpomène’s captain might let them pass without a fight. The Inconstant was often seen traveling those waters to trade or ferry people to and from Elba, though the accompanying flotilla, however meager, was sure to raise concern. Napoleon might also have been wagering that the Melpomène would let him pass out of support for his cause, or even better, that its crew could be persuaded to accompany the flotilla to safe landing and would join in against the Partridge if necessary.

  * * *

  • • •

  ADYE AND CAMPBELL had managed to get out of Livorno at four on the morning of February 27, and were steadily making their way west toward Napoleon’s ships, but early that afternoon the Partridge veered off sharply, headed toward Portoferraio. If the crew of the Inconstant had recognized the Partridge on this bell-clear day, why was the reverse not also true? By its recorded coordinates, the Partridge at one point in the day came within twelve nautical miles of the Inconstant. The log from the Partridge shows an entry at 11 a.m. noting that its lookout had spotted “three sail.” But this doesn’t necessarily mean that anyone on board realized they were seeing the escaped Inconstant or any other ships that would have put them on alert. Merchant vessels sailed the waters fairly regularly, and Adye knew that some English and Swedish ships had left Livorno at roughly the same time as had the Partridge.

  Campbell’s journal from this time is troublingly sparse. His entry reads only:

  At 9 p.m. [on the twenty-sixth] I went down below, and thought the brig was getting up her anchor. But as it turned out, on account of there being no wind, she did not leave the harbor until early this morning [the twenty-seventh]. In the course of the day we saw the French brig Zéphir.

  This could have been a case of mistaken identity, since the Zéphir and the Inconstant were produced in the same shipyard, both to plans from the master shipbuilder Jacques-Noel Sané, and were launched within a year of each other. Mariotti had informed Campbell that the Zéphir would be patrolling the region, so its sighting wouldn’t have caused him or Adye any great surprise. They were apparently so convinced Napoleon was either heading toward Italy to join Murat or still on Elba, where they might catch him if they hurried, that any ship sailing north toward France would have failed to pique their interest enough for them to pursue and lose time reaching Portoferraio.

  At a later and unspecified date, Campbell added a footnote to his original entry, writing that “we must have been nearly in sight of Napoleon’s flotilla, as the Zéphir, it is since known, spoke [sic] the Inconstant [meaning maneuvering close enough for an exchange of communications].”

  * * *

  • • •

  THAT THE PARTRIDGE MISSED Napoleon’s flotilla is easier to explain than that all seven of Napoleon’s ships passed the French Melpomène without any issue in the early afternoon of February 27. The ship’s captain, Collet, took no action against the flotilla as it sailed by within plain view. Napoleon spoke on Saint Helena of having been totally confident that the Melpomène would never fire on them. “We knew enough about the feeling of the officers of these vessels, let alone the crews, to be sure they would hoist the tricolor and defend the Emperor against the English corvette,” he told Bertrand.

  Under interrogation by Lord Burghersh in early March, Campbell’s Elban agent Ricci swore that the “three sail” spotted by Adye and Campbell must have been the Inconstant, the Melpomène, and the Fleur de Lys, parting after a preordained ocean rendezvous somewhere north of Elba. Warned by Burghersh “against deceiving himself and the world upon a matter of so much consequence,” Ricci stuck to his claim, adding that he’d seen the three ships himself from the high ridge of Portoferraio. The captains of the three French ships never properly accounted for their exact whereabouts and actions during the course of February 27, though through their vagueness they could just as easily have been trying to protect themselves against charges of carelessness or cowardice as they were against charges of collusion.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DAY’S MOST BAFFLING episode of all came when the Inconstant passed in close range of the Zéphir, which was sailing toward Livorno, where its captain, Andrieux, was to get confidential instructions from Mariotti concerning its “cruise of observation” in Elban waters. When the Zéphir was first spotted, Napoleon had ordered his crew to battle stations, but then called off the order when he recognized the warship as a French one. He later claimed that his officers had wanted to board the Zéphir to give Andrieux the chance to peacefully come over to their side, but he’d calculated that the reward of an extra ship on their side wasn’t worth the risk of a failed boarding mission.

  North of Capraia, the two ships passed close enough for their respective crews to communicate through loud-hailers and by shouting. The uniformed troops lay down on the decks so as not to be spotted. Napoleon said that he hid behind the wheelhouse and that his grenadiers had quickly taken off their bearskin hats and replaced them with the tied scarves of seasoned s
ailors. On Saint Helena, Napoleon claimed that Andrieux had hailed the Inconstant and then, presuming it was on a standard trade run, had asked only for news out of Elba, but in another recounting of the escape he said that Andrieux had known who he was dealing with and had simply decided not to involve his crew in stopping the flotilla. Andrieux, for his part, later said that he’d recognized the Inconstant and that while he never saw Napoleon, the unusual number of men on board made him suspect it carried the emperor; he explained that he thought the ship was bound for Naples and that if he’d known France was the destination, he would have immediately taken down the Bourbon white and sailed alongside Napoleon.

  In his memoir, Peyrusse described what appears to be the most plausible alternative to the versions produced by Napoleon and Andrieux, writing that the French captain had recognized his colleague Taillade aboard the Inconstant and so maneuvered his ship so they could talk, and that they had a casual conversation, mostly about nautical matters, during which Taillade said they were headed for Genoa and asked Andrieux if he had any message he wanted to get to Elba when it returned. Peyrusse claimed that Andrieux, apologizing for being impolite, asked after Napoleon’s health, and that was that. Later, the Polish officer Colonel Jerzmanowski, who joined in the landing, recalled the encounter in a way that corroborated Peyrusse’s account, though he added a bit of embroidery, saying that when Andrieux had asked after Napoleon’s health, the hidden Napoleon himself had shouted across that the emperor was “wonderfully well.” Whatever the truth of this episode, Andrieux did receive a promotion during Napoleon’s brief return to power.