by Philip Dwyer
It was after this that he decided to put on a mixture of uniforms – an Austrian uniform given to him by Köller, a Prussian forage cap given to him by Truchsess-Waldburg and a cloak donated by Shuvalov, a motley collection of the clothes of the armies that had defeated him. He adopted the name of Lord Burghersh, the British military commissioner to the Allies. To make the subterfuge appear even more authentic, he rode in a carriage with Köller, insisting Köller whistle a tune every time they rode into a town or village, and that the coachman smoke (neither habit would have been allowed normally in the presence of the Emperor).138 The Emperor was without his clothes, naked before friend and foe. It was quite uncharacteristic of him since he was, as we know, courageous in battle. What he obviously feared above all was the angry mob, a throwback perhaps to the days when he had seen what it was capable of at the Tuileries in 1792. After Aix, he began to feel safer and adopted a more imperious manner, which made his shameful exhibition even more humiliating. What he eventually concluded from this show of hostility was that the Midi had been stirred up by the provisional government, but that on the whole the French were still favourable to him.139 In other words, he refused to admit that his own government had done wrong.
He met his sister Pauline on 26 April in a large country house, the Château du Bouillidou, near the town of Le Luc. They embraced, shed a few tears and spent the next four hours together in private.140 She was the only sibling to bother trying to see her brother, and perhaps the only one who felt affection for him. Not even his mother made an attempt to see him, although they had passed each other near Auxerre. With the collapse of the Empire, his brothers and sisters now found it prudent to flee and to keep a low profile. Caroline was busy with Murat in Naples intriguing to stay in power. Elisa was obliged to leave Lucca in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany followed by a mob that insulted her along the way. She is reported to have stuck her head out of the carriage, pointed a threatening finger at them and shouted, ‘I’ll be back, you rabble’ (Je reviendrai, canailles).141 She was never to return. Joseph found asylum in Switzerland. Lucien tried to leave for America but was arrested by the English and interned, first on Malta and then in England. While there he wrote an epic poem entitled Charlemagne ou l’Eglise delivrée (Charlemagne or the Church delivered). It had little to do with Charlemagne and a great deal more to do with his brother, harking back to the perennial problem of Napoleon’s succession. It was a way of criticizing the regime, the last jibe of a brother who had become anti-Napoleon.
Napoleon had in fact stopped in the region fifteen years before, on his return from Egypt, when he had borrowed a carriage from the owner of the Château du Bouillidou, which he subsequently failed to return. Now the mistress of the house apparently barged her way into his presence to remonstrate with him, but refused to believe, at first, that she was before the Emperor, so oddly dressed was he. The next morning, 27 April, they set off again, escorted by two squadrons of Austrian hussars that were stationed at Le Luc. The escort enabled Napoleon to change back into his own clothes; they arrived at Fréjus, a change of itinerary at Napoleon’s insistence, early that afternoon. The original destination had been Saint-Tropez, but Napoleon had wanted to spend what might have been his last night in France at the Chapeau Rouge, an inn at Fréjus where, fifteen years earlier, he had stayed the night after landing there from Egypt to launch his remarkable political career. Now he spent a couple of days there, most of which was passed in his room, where he ‘walked rapidly up and down’, occasionally appearing at the window ‘to watch some frigates arriving at anchorage’.142
Napoleon does not appear to have been in any great hurry to leave the shores of France. This was perhaps an ultimate controlling moment on his part, a niggling way of letting the British know just who was in charge – Truchsess-Waldburg says that he had ‘recovered his imperial dignity’ – or it may simply have been hesitation, the realization that he was leaving France once and for all. (It did not prevent him on other occasions talking as though he would be back in a few months’ time.) As with the departure from Fontainebleau, Napoleon procrastinated. On 29 April, the day the commissioners, receiving news that troops loyal to Napoleon were pouring over the border from Italy, decided that it was time to set sail, the Emperor informed Campbell that he was not very well and wanted to delay his departure for a few hours. He may indeed have been ill, it is difficult to say; he had certainly made no mention of it in a letter to Marie-Louise the day before, but that does not mean anything.143 He seems to have had his hand forced that evening by the captain of the vessel, Captain Sir Thomas Ussher, who, shortly before seven, presented himself to Napoleon and told him that his barge was waiting to take him to the frigate Undaunted. Napoleon yielded, fearful once again perhaps that a mob might form and turn against him.144
He was escorted to the beach on that moonlit evening by six or seven Hungarian hussars, with the inevitable sound of bugles and the neighing of horses. On the beach, a group of people had assembled, some no doubt loyal supporters wanting to see their Emperor for the last time, others there out of curiosity. Stepping down from the carriage, Napoleon embraced Count Shuvalov, then took Ussher’s arm and walked towards the barge. The sea was calm and the only sound that could be heard was the playing of a trumpet march.145 There had been some discussion about whether he was to receive a twenty-one-gun salute or not. Napoleon insisted, and in the end the captain of the Undaunted relented after being shown instructions from Lord Castlereagh (to Campbell), which clearly stated that Napoleon was to be treated as a sovereign.146 (Ussher thus ignored naval regulations, which prohibited gun salutes after sunset.) At precisely half-past eight in the evening, Napoleon left French soil and boarded the English vessel. Napoleon’s Empire had crumbled into the dust of history. After more than twenty years of one of the bloodiest series of wars in European history, Napoleon, France and Europe had little to show for it.
24
Sovereign of Elba
Napoleon Returns to his Roots
The crossing took place in bad weather so that what normally would have taken two days lasted five. The fact that living conditions were crowded did not make things any easier. Ussher had to find quarters on his already cramped frigate for thirty-six other people. Napoleon took over the captain’s quarters.
He was up the next morning at four o’clock with a strong cup of coffee.1 On the whole, he was in good spirits, admitting that on the journey down to the coast from Fontainebleau he had shown himself at his very worst – cul-nu (bare arsed) was the expression he used. In a letter home, an officer on board the Undaunted, Lieutenant Hastings, described Napoleon as ‘5 feet 5 inches, inclining to fatness, which makes him appear inactive and unwieldy. His eyes are grey, extremely penetrating: the expression of his countenance by no means agreeable; and his manners far from dignified or graceful.’2 It should be remembered that the British had been fed a less than flattering portrait of ‘Boney’ for the last fifteen years, so some had trouble accepting the affable man who presented himself before them.
On 1 May, the Undaunted came within sight of Corsica. Ussher rose to find Napoleon on the bridge, ‘very nervous’, supposedly worried about the political situation there.3 Did the sight of Corsica remind him where he had come from, what he had become, and where his fate now lay? We do not know what Napoleon felt about his fall from grace, having gone in the space of months from governing millions of people to ruling over the inhabitants of a small island. We know that Bertrand appeared depressed, although Napoleon managed to maintain his good humour. In some respects, with the appearance of Corsica, Napoleon was forced to confront his origins. Two days later he was on the bridge again, spyglass raised, trying to catch a glimpse of the little black spot on the horizon that was Elba.4
The island of Elba is relatively small, about twenty-seven kilometres long and eighteen wide, with a mostly inaccessible shoreline, and a population in 1814 of about 12,000 inhabitants. There were 5,000 troops stationed there as well. The largest town, Portoferraio, co
ntained about 3,000 people, their houses clinging to the hillside between the waterfront and the fort on top of San Rocco. Elbans were very much like their Corsican counterparts no more than fifty-odd kilometres away. Like Corsica, the island had an incredibly chequered history, changing hands so many times that its inhabitants had few allegiances. Like Corsicans, the inhabitants of Elba were fiercely independent and tolerated foreign domination, whether Italian, French or English, with difficulty. And Elbans spoke a similar dialect to Corsicans. Napoleon would have known more or less what to expect for, as usual, he informed himself about where he was going. He had taken a travelogue from his library in Fontainebleau by Arsenne Thiébaut de Berneaud entitled Voyage à l’isle d’Elbe. Published in 1808, the account is flattering about the island’s inhabitants – a good, hospitable, hard-working people – but is far less so when it comes to describing Portoferraio – ‘it has nothing that could interest the mind or the soul’.5
What many Elbans did not want was Napoleon. Just as the Empire was collapsing, so too was French authority on the island; it would appear that the inhabitants, including the French officers, were not aware that Napoleon had actually abdicated and that the wars were over. Only weeks before the Emperor arrived, Elbans had risen in revolt against the regime. In principle, the island was commanded by General Dalesme with a force of mostly Italian conscripts. The garrison at Porto Longone had mutinied, killed a number of officers, shot and then hacked to pieces the commanding officer, and deserted to the mainland. The garrison at Portoferraio had been given the option of returning to Italy, and most of them had done so.6
The general mood of the Elbans just before Napoleon arrived was, therefore, anti-French to say the least, something the British observed and which understandably worried them a little, while the western part of the island had still not been brought back under French control. At the village of Marciana, an effigy of Napoleon was burnt.7 Nevertheless, news that the Emperor had been exiled to Elba spread quickly and appears to have been greeted with some enthusiasm as it dawned on people that his presence would mean business, money and trade, a notion helped along by the local bishop who promised his flock that ‘wealth will pour into the land’.8 That night, 3 May, the inhabitants of Portoferraio placed candles in their windows to welcome Napoleon.9
The morning of 4 May was spent working out the disembarkation, as well as the religious and military ceremonials that would be used to mark that passage.10 On landing, Napoleon was received by local military and civil authorities, and was handed the keys to the island by a trembling mayor, Pietro Traditi, so nervous that he could not utter a single word nor find the little speech he had written.11 The island’s inhabitants were so curious to see the great man reduced to the state in which they now found him – they had forgotten how much harm he had caused them – that they pressed in around him so that the troops accompanying the procession through the town had trouble keeping order.12 The bishop, Joseph-Philippe Arrighi, a distant cousin of Napoleon’s, ended up pushing and shouting at those who blocked the way.13 Napoleon, under a canopy, accompanied by the music of three violins and two double basses, walked towards the church but was ‘uncommonly sombre, and his eyes shifted from one to another of the people surrounding him, trying to make out what they thought, and endeavouring in vain to hide the feelings of distrust and fear which he himself experienced’.14 A Te Deum was offered in the local church during which Napoleon appears to have shed some tears. One can only imagine what they were for – that this was now his life, on a godforsaken island with a godforsaken people?
The Te Deum was followed by a ceremony in the town hall before Napoleon finally retired to the apartment that had been set up for him on the disused first floor of what was commonly referred to as the ‘Biscotteria’, the biscuit factory. It had been quickly cleaned while the more prominent members of the town gave furniture so that it resembled some kind of dwelling. ‘The accommodation is mediocre,’ Napoleon wrote to Marie-Louise that evening, ‘but I will arrange for something better in a week or two.’15 He no doubt realized that these letters would be read, so they possibly lack the intimacy that can usually be found in his more private correspondence. It must also have been a way either of assuaging the allies’ fears or of making it clear what he was unhappy about. Marie-Louise, on the other hand, continued to profess her love for him: ‘I, tormented, loving you more tenderly than ever, I spend whole days despairing of ever seeing you again.’16
A Dead Man, in Perpetual Movement
What does a man, once the most powerful in Europe, fallen from grace, exiled to a European backwater, do with the rest of his life? Napoleon found solace in habit; he compensated for his loss of power with a frenzy of activity. As much as possible, he imitated court life at the Tuileries.17 With more than sixty servants, this would have been a relatively easy thing to do. Colonel Campbell remarked that, while those around him sank under the weight of fatigue, Napoleon remained in ‘perpetual movement’.18 The day after he arrived, he woke at four in the morning to go and inspect the town’s defences and did not return until ten, six hours later, for breakfast.19 The defences were better than he had expected. One week after arriving, he went on a trip around the island. He moved into the Villa Mulini – it can still be visited today – and started to renovate and refurbish it with whatever he could get his hands on so that it became a reasonably comfortable but modest thirty-room villa. He added an extra floor, although he himself lived only on the ground floor where there was a bathroom, bedroom, study and library. Upstairs was meant for Marie-Louise and his son. He requisitioned furniture from the Piombino Palace in Tuscany, once the residence of his sister Pauline but now vacant. A ship carrying furniture to Rome was driven to Elba by a storm; Napoleon requisitioned that too. Short of clothes, he bought the cotton cargo of an English ship that had been captured before war’s end; he was able to supply his entourage with clean linen and his soldiers with uniforms.
He soon got into a routine.20 He would invariably wake at four in the morning, go over dispatches, dictate letters and orders, read the newspapers and go for a walk in his garden. He would then have a nap and then sometimes would go riding with Bertrand for a couple of hours, visiting the various constructions that he had ordered carried out on the island. He would eat around ten or eleven o’clock, often alone, sometimes with Bertrand or Antoine Drouot, one of his aides-de-camp. He would then shut himself away, either to work or to nap.21 It was the time of the day when he would like to take his bath, spending an hour or more reading, dictating letters or conversing. Around four o’clock he would often again go out, this time in a calash, holding audience with just about anyone he met along the way.22 When he returned to Mulini he would hold a more formal audience with an assortment of French and English tourists wanting to see him, most of whom had an ‘intense admiration’ for him,23 Corsicans who had come to solicit favours from Letizia (she arrived in August), officers on half-pay seeking more lucrative commissions, women who had come to throw themselves at him – such as the Prince Regent’s mistress, the Countess of Jersey, and Signora Filippi from Lucca who was one of those rare women who had dressed and fought as a man in the Army of Italy – and an assortment of odd characters and charlatans all wanting something. Not that they had direct access to him; court etiquette still applied even if it was not as elaborate as it used to be.24 Of course they had to be of sufficient rank and standing to be granted an audience or be invited to dinner; otherwise they could hope to talk to Napoleon if they ran into him on the roadside when he was out riding.25 Some waited five or six hours to see him and then re-embarked as soon as they had done so. Between May 1814 and February 1815 around sixty English visitors made the trip from Leghorn to Elba to see Napoleon; the island had become a destination on the Grand Tour, which was coming back into vogue after its long interruption during the wars.26 They were mostly young, mostly from educated backgrounds, generally Whigs, and all overwhelmed with a curiosity to see the great man fallen. Napoleon loved to gossip, but
there were few on the island who could amuse him for long. He relied on his visitors to keep him informed of what was going on on the Continent. He was often irritable at the end of the day – that is, in the evenings when there was nothing to do. After dinner, which could take place any time between six and eight o’clock, he would play cards or dominoes with his mother for an hour or two, or chess with Drouot, and would retire about nine, sometimes playing the opening lines of Haydn’s ‘Surprise’ symphony on the piano as a cue that he was going to bed where sleep would generally be interrupted.
Part of him wanted, needed to transform his little domain into a model island kingdom, a reflection of his own idealized self-image. Part of him needed to keep his mind occupied, and he did so by turning his attention to the smallest detail, anything from how large an allowance should be given to invalid troops in hospital so that they could buy food, to where horses could be watered, to laws regulating the collection of night soil, to how much the gardener should be paid and for what tasks.27 Bertrand recalled how Napoleon ‘dictated letters about fowls, ducks, meat and all eatables as if he was dealing at Paris with matters of the greatest importance’.28 One hundred families were sent to the island of Pianosa, about twenty kilometres offshore, to cultivate wheat, the plains of Lacona were to be irrigated, the valleys reforested, olive trees and potatoes planted in every communal plot. Perhaps the most revealing trait though was the extent to which Napoleon would become enthusiastic about a building project, and then, despondent, abandon all interest a short time later. This happened time and again over the few months he was there, indulging what seemed like whims, and then when he became bored, or the novelty wore off, or if the obstacles proved too difficult, or it became too costly, he simply gave up on them.
