by Philip Dwyer
It finally dawned on Caulaincourt, as he watched his imperial master writhe, what had happened. He then called for Dr Yvan. Yvan had been with Bonaparte since Italy; it was he who had seen to Napoleon’s wound at Regensburg; he had lived in the Emperor’s intimate circle from the very beginning. When Yvan arrived, and Napoleon called out to him to give him a draught so that he could put an end to his suffering, Yvan refused and made him vomit. Once the Emperor was out of danger, Yvan rushed out of the room, found a horse and rode out into the night to Paris, afraid perhaps that he would be implicated in the suicide, since it was he who had given Napoleon the poison in Russia.93 After vomiting it all back up, Napoleon remained in his apartment, eventually coming around at daybreak, when he began ranting again to the unfortunate Caulaincourt about how he had been mistreated by the sovereigns of Europe, flitting from one subject to another as the morning waxed, about how he would lead a quiet life on Elba, how Louis XVIII would have no need to change anything other than the sheets on his bed, so well run and organized was the administration.
There were a few witnesses to this scene, enough for us to conclude that there was indeed a suicide attempt. Caulaincourt believed that Napoleon had attempted to take his own life because of the humiliation he felt; his honour had been questioned so his life had become unbearable. On Elba, Napoleon denied it. ‘What, kill myself ? Had I nothing better to do than this – like a miserable bankrupt, who, because he has lost his goods, determines to lose his life? Napoleon is always Napoleon, and always will know how to be content and bear any fortune.’94 There was of course a certain amount of shame involved not so much in killing oneself as in failing to do so, which is why he would want to deny it.95 Napoleon’s attempt perhaps places him within Mme de Staël’s category of the ‘repentant criminal’, someone who takes his own life in order to redeem himself, out of remorse, as a kind of apology. One may doubt that Napoleon did it for anything other than self-pity, hence the denial. He had forgotten his own injunction, ‘that a soldier should know how to conquer pain and the melancholy of passions’, that there was as much ‘courage in suffering with constance the sorrows of the heart’ as there was in standing steady before a battery of cannon. There was part of him that did not want to admit that he was weak (in his own estimation, that is), and that he could have contemplated killing himself. Some historians have since questioned whether in fact he had attempted suicide, but the witnesses all agree that he swallowed a potion that night.6 In any event, by morning he had come around; it had become obvious that he was not going to die. ‘I shall live’, he declared, ‘since death is no more willing to take me on my bed than on the battlefield.’ If death had been given a bit of a helping hand, it might have been able to carry out its job.
The Struggle for Marie-Louise
Part of the background to his deepening depression was the struggle over Marie-Louise, who was still in Blois. When she learnt that Napoleon had abdicated (Colonel Galbois had been sent to Blois with a letter from Napoleon announcing this), it came as a shock: in her naivety she was unable to believe that the allies would want to overthrow her husband, convinced as she was that her father would never tolerate it.97 At the time, she reacted like a loyal wife, mother and queen; she wanted to set out immediately to join him at Fontainebleau.98 When, however, she attempted to leave, on the morning of 9 April, her escape was stymied by her lady-in-waiting, the Duchesse de Montebello, who was able to dissuade her from carrying through her plan (the Duchesse was afraid of ending up on Elba).99
Two things had happened the previous day that made her open to persuasion. The first was that she had had to cope with the Bonaparte brothers. When Joseph learnt of Napoleon’s abdication, he was deeply afflicted by the news, while Jérôme exploded in anger.100 Then, when they realized that Marie-Louise might leave they burst into her apartments in travelling clothes on the morning of Good Friday (8 April), told her that the Russian army was close (which was a lie) and that they all had to depart at once.101 There ensued a shouting match between the two deposed kings, Joseph and Jérôme, and Marie-Louise; the Empress’s guard refused to allow her to leave.102 The second thing that happened was the arrival of the Tsar’s aide-de-camp, General Count Shuvalov, and the Baron de Saint-Aignan, the representative of the provisional government. Shuvalov’s mission was to escort her to Rambouillet, where her father was to meet her.103 Halfway along the road to Fontainebleau was Orleans; she naively thought that she could travel on to her husband from there. In any event, the allies and the provisional French government were not yet acting in concert. The provisional French government decided that it had to prevent the imperial couple from meeting up by all possible means. It did not want Napoleon placing himself under the protection of the House of Habsburg, a wish it shared with Napoleon himself.104 Marie-Louise wrote to her husband on 8 April to say that she was leaving the next day for Orleans, and that she would be in Fontainebleau the day after.105 Two days later she wrote to say that she had decided to see her father first, and that she believed it her duty to do so, in the interests of Napoleon and her son.106
Her departure from Blois (for Orleans) on 9 April in the company of Shuvalov led to a veritable exodus from her entourage. Her decision not to join her husband in exile once led historians to judge her as having a weak, irresolute character.107 This is undeserved; one has to take into consideration Napoleon’s own vacillation on the subject. Shortly before leaving Blois, Marie-Louise wrote to Napoleon at Fontainebleau to say, ‘I am awaiting orders from you, and I do beseech you to let me come.’108 The lack of decisiveness can be seen in a letter he wrote to an exhausted, sickly Marie-Louise at Orleans.109 His letters during this period show a mind in torment, about his own future and the future of his son. It is easy to conclude from them that he was convinced even at this late stage that Marie-Louise would accompany him to Elba, but anecdotal evidence suggests that he was more than hesitant about obliging her to live in exile.110 We know that Francis delayed his entrance into Paris so that it did not coincide with the fall of his daughter from the throne.111 It is likely that, as a result of Napoleon’s letters, Marie-Louise now saw her father as her only means of protection.112 She wrote to Francis on 10 April (twice) to say that she was not going to join Napoleon.113 It was becoming clear in her letters that she had been swayed by the Austrian lobby, so to speak, and Metternich’s assurances that she and her son would have an independent existence.114 She was apparently turning her back on her husband and putting herself under the protection of her father, but then nothing in the official letters to Napoleon can be taken at face value; they were being read by those who now controlled her movements.
We get a better insight into the workings of her mind from a note to Napoleon scribbled on the way from Orleans to Rambouillet and which was delivered by a Polish officer in her confidence. In it, she exhorts, ‘Be on your guard . . . we are being played, I am in mortal anxiety for you, but I will have courage on seeing my father and I will tell him I want absolutely to join you.’115 But Marie-Louise was a young woman of twenty-two who was torn between loyalty to her husband, ensuring a future for her son, and loyalty to her father. That same day, pressured by the Austrian envoys sent by her father, she left for Rambouillet. ‘I thought that I should concede with good grace,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘but when I have seen him [Francis], I will come and join you; one would have to be barbaric to try and stop me.’116
When she arrived at Rambouillet, her father was not yet there. Metternich was trying to draw her even further away from Fontainebleau by persuading her to join her father at Trianon in Versailles where he had decided to set up house while in Paris. She was convinced that they were doing all of that to get her to come to Austria, but she still insisted in her letters to Napoleon that she was going to join him.117 She used a sore throat as a pretext not to leave Rambouillet, so that Francis and Metternich were obliged to travel to her. We do not know what was said between Francis and his daughter, in the presence of Metternich, when he arrived in t
here on 14 April, but they persuaded her to leave for Austria.118 She apparently fell back into the role of the dutiful daughter. It was an easier role than that of an independent, strong-willed woman.119 She no longer had to think; she simply had to obey, what she had really wanted all along. She wrote to Napoleon to tell him that she was going back to Vienna, ‘because my father desires it so strongly, and I see that if I do not go, they will take me by force’. Her plan, she explained, was to travel to Parma during the international congress that was convened in Vienna to discuss the make-up of Europe, and from there to Elba.120 According to the letter, her father was opposed to the plan, which means she had discussed it with him, but that for the moment she did not want to insist, ‘so I beg you not to tell anyone, because that would spoil everything’. ‘He has been very good to me,’ she wrote of her father, ‘but it has not eased the terrible shock he gave me, preventing me from joining you, from seeing you, from travelling with you.’ She concluded, ‘It is impossible for me to be happy without you.’
The Long Goodbye
Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, who had fought with Wellington in the Peninsula, and had been at the battle of Bautzen, arrived at Fontainebleau on 16 April ready to escort Napoleon to the south, only to find that the Prussians had already made all the arrangements. The other three allied commissioners who were to accompany Napoleon on the road to Elba were already there: the Russian Count Shuvalov, the Prussian Count Truchsess-Waldburg and the Austrian General Baron Franz Köller. Campbell had his first audience with Napoleon the next morning, 17 April, after mass. Campbell’s left eye was covered in a bandage and his arm was in a sling from wounds received at La-Fère-Champenoise on 26 March, when a party of Cossacks mistook him for a Frenchman. Campbell, who spoke French well, arrived only a few days after the attempted suicide. The meeting must have been a strange one. Napoleon, unshaven, uncombed, with particles of snuff scattered on his upper lip and breast, was ‘in the most perturbed and distressed state of mind’. ‘I saw before me’, wrote Campbell of their first encounter, ‘a short active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell.’121 When he spoke of being separated from his wife and child, ‘the tears actually ran down his cheeks. He continued to talk in a wild and excited style, being at times greatly affected.’122 The Austrian representative, Baron Köller, observed Napoleon unnoticed, while at mass in the palace chapel. The Emperor sometimes rubbed ‘his forehead with his hands, then stuffing part of his fingers into his mouth’, gnawed ‘the ends of them in the most agitated and excited manner’.123 Over the coming days, he would alternate between these moments of extreme distress and utter calm.
His departure was planned for the morning of 20 April. Napoleon wrote a letter that morning telling Marie-Louise that he intended leaving, and he told Berthier to inform the commissioners that he would indeed be setting off that day. At ten o’clock, however, he informed Köller that he had changed his mind and that he would not be leaving for Elba after all. He insisted that, since the allies had refused to let his wife follow him, they had broken their undertakings; then, vaguely threatening to raise a new army, he repeated that he might seek refuge in England.124 Köller and the other commissioners were obliged to argue with him for two hours. In the end he was persuaded to leave; what choice did he have?
According to most accounts, Napoleon descended the grand horseshoe staircase in the château’s Courtyard of the White Horse, where the Old Guard were waiting in order of battle. The courtyard was also filled with onlookers from the town and the surrounding areas. Maret, whose account of this scene is probably the most accurate, asserts that he came down the stairs ‘in an attitude as assured as if he were ascending the steps to the throne’.125 He then addressed the troops in a farewell that is one of the high points of the legend. ‘Officers and soldiers of the Guard, I bid you farewell. I have sacrificed all my rights, and am ready to sacrifice myself, for all my life has been devoted to the happiness and glory of France.’126 Rather than risk civil war, he had committed the ultimate sacrifice, for the good of France of course. He could not kiss them all goodbye, he said, but he would kiss their general (Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes), which he then proceeded to do. Next, in a somewhat melodramatic gesture, even for the time, he kissed the Guard’s standard three times, and covered his face with it for almost a minute. Raising his left hand he spoke out, ‘Farewell, my old companions! My good wishes will always be with you! Keep me in your memories!’127 – or something to that effect. The message was printed in the newspapers of the day – a sort of press release – and reproduced verbatim in later memoirs.
Napoleon was visibly moved, but one cannot help but wonder how much of this emotion was self-pity, and how much was show put on for his men and for posterity. We have seen how he agonized not over the fate of France, but over his own fate. Of course, it is possible to agonize over both, but Napoleon always put the interests of himself and his family before that of the patrie. The message contained in his words and gestures is in any event clear: his main concern had always been the glory of France and the whole of Europe had been armed against him – that is, against France. He presented himself as the sacrificial lamb, the man who could have fought on if he had chosen to, but who decided that it was better to avoid ‘civil war’. Of course the logic of the situation seems to have escaped most, that this was a predicament of his own making.
The timing of Napoleon’s melodramatic gesture was perfect. According to all the accounts, there was hardly a dry eye in the house; tears streamed down the faces of most of the men present, hardened killers the lot.128 It even moved the four foreign representatives who wept out of empathy, sharing the moment, realizing possibly that an era had come to an end. That tearful farewell obviously represented different things to different men, but for the faithful this sort of communal mourning was prompted by the loss of the one they had followed and idolized for years. They were losing their father. The Guard then burnt the eagles and, according to some accounts, divided the ashes among themselves. Some took the gesture even further by eating the ashes so that they would not become separated from them.129 Napoleon then got into a carriage with Bertrand and drove off, or rather fourteen carriages transporting Napoleon and his entourage, escorted by a group of cavalry, drove off.130 As he passed through the gates he lowered the window, and was seen with tears in his eyes.131
If the faithful shed a tear, others were glad to see the back of him, while yet others would try to get a piece of him. At Nevers, some 175 kilometres further south, townspeople cried out, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, giving him the mistaken impression that he was not as hated as some of the newspapers made out. When they came to Villeneuve-sur-Allier on Friday evening (22 April), the cavalry escort that had accompanied them up to that point returned home. They were to be replaced by Austrian and Russian cavalry, but Napoleon brashly refused their help asserting, because of the reception he had received till then, that he had no need of them. He soon learnt to regret his decision. By the time he reached Montélimar (25 April), not far from Lyons, he had become aware of a change in attitude among the people he encountered. Indeed, the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ became increasingly scarce after Villeneuve-sur-Allier, replaced with cries of ‘Vivent les Bourbons!’ and ‘Vive Louis XVIII!’ At Orange, he was greeted with shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’, was jeered at and had stones thrown at his carriage. At Valence he was greeted with silence.132 At Avignon, a town that had celebrated his fall, the procession passed through at six in the morning. A crowd of two to three hundred people had turned out to see him, and menacingly surrounded his carriage as the horses were being changed. In the end, there was little more than a few boos but it must have put the wind up him.133 At Orgon, twenty-four kilometres from Avignon, the convoy was met at the entrance to the town by a stuffed dummy hung from a gibbet. A bloody inscription – ‘Sooner or later, this will be the fate of the tyrant’ – was placed on its stomach; the victim was meant to represent Napoleon. The
crowd, ‘drunk with hatred’, climbed on to the carriage, shook their fists at him and cried (in the local Provençal dialect), ‘Open the doors!’, ‘Drag him out!’, ‘Hang him!’, ‘Cut off his head!’ Others threw stones at the carriage while some women shouted, ‘Give me back my son!’ According to one witness, Napoleon hid behind Bertrand: ‘he was pale, desperate and speechless’.134 It was Shuvalov who saved the day by laying into the crowd with his fists, all the while shouting that he was Russian to ensure that they would not turn on him; he managed to quieten them long enough to harangue them into submission.135
Alfred-Nicolas Normand, Façade sur la cour des Adieux et l’escalier du Fer à Cheval (A view of the Farewell Courtyard and the horseshoe staircase). This was built by Francis I, and dubbed the Staircase of the White Horse, at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the setting of Napoleon’s farewell to the Guard, 1888.
As a result of this confrontation, Napoleon decided, as a precautionary measure, to change into a shabby blue riding-coat, and to wear a round hat sporting the Bourbon white cockade. He mounted one of the post-horses and rode on ahead of the convoy, accompanied by a courier named Pélart. At Saint-Cannat, Berthier and a courier by the name of Vernet, who had taken Napoleon’s place in the carriage, were surrounded by an angry crowd and attacked with stones, which broke the windows of the carriage. When the rest of the party caught up with Napoleon at an inn called La Calade about three leagues out of Aix, they found him in a small room, his elbows on the table, head in his hands, tears streaming down his face, lost in reflection.136 He had been unsettled by the landlady, who had ranted against Napoleon for causing the deaths of her son and nephew. She did not think that the Emperor would make it away alive, and that he would be justly murdered along the way. Little did she know, of course, that Napoleon was right in front of her while she said this. He had refused to touch the food for fear of being poisoned and sent for some bread and wine from his carriage. When he discovered that there was no back door or window through which he could slip out, he became even more distraught. ‘At the least noise,’ wrote Truchsess-Waldburg, ‘he started up in terror and changed colour.’137
