The Death of Napoleon

by Simon Leys

  SIMON LEYS (1935–2014) was the pen name of Pierre Ryckmans, who was born in Belgium and settled in Australia in 1970. He taught Chinese literature at the Australian National University and was Professor of Chinese Studies at the University of Sydney from 1987 to 1993. Leys was a contributor to such publications as The New York Review of Books, Le Monde, and Le Figaro Littéraire, writing on literature and contemporary China. Among his books are Chinese Shadows, Other People’s Thoughts, and The Wreck of the Batavia & Prosper. In addition to The Death of Napoleon NYRB publishes The Hall of Uselessness, a collection of essays, and On the Abolition of All Political Parties, an essay by Simone Weil that Leys translated and edited. His many awards include the Prix Renaudot, the Prix Femina, the Prix Guizot, and the Christina Stead Prize for Fiction.

  PATRICIA CLANCY has received several translation prizes, including the British Independent Prize for Foreign Fiction for her co-translation of The Death of Napoleon and the Scott Moncrieff Prize for her 1999 translation of The Black Room at Longwood: Napoleon’s Exile on Saint Helena by Jean-Paul Kauffmann.

  THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON

  SIMON LEYS

  Translated from the French by

  PATRICIA CLANCY and

  SIMON LEYS

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 2006 by Pierre Ryckmans

  Translation copyright © 1991 by Pierre Ryckmans and Patricia Clancy

  All rights reserved.

  First published in French in 1986 as La Mort de Napoléon by Hermann,

  Éditeurs des sciences et des arts. Published in Australia by Black Inc.

  Cover art: Napoleon the 1st at St. Helena, lithograph, Manchester, 1855, based on Denzil O. Ibbetson, Napoleon on His Deathbed, Taken the Morning After His Death at Longwood House, Saint Helena, 1821

  Cover design: Katy Homans.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Leys, Simon, 1935-2014.

  [Mort de Napoléon. English]

  The Death of Napoleon / by Simon Leys ; translated by Patricia Clancy and Simon Leys.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books Classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-843-0 () — ISBN 978-1-59017-842-3 (paperback)

  1. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821—Fiction. I. Clancy, P. A., translator. II. Title.

  PQ2672.E99

  843'.914—dc23

  2015005731

  ISBN 978-1-59017-843-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  I. A Sunrise on the Atlantic

  II. Waterloo Revisited

  III. An Incident at the Border

  IV. Watermelons & Cantaloupes from Provence

  V. The Conquest of Paris

  VI. The Night Empire

  VII. Ubi Victoria?

  For

  Hanfang

  What a pity to see a mind as great as Napoleon’s devoted to trivial things such as empires, historic events, the thundering of cannons and of men; he believed in glory, in posterity, in Caesar; nations in turmoil and other trifles absorbed all his attention. . . . How could he fail to see that what really mattered was something else entirely?

  —PAUL VALÉRY

  Mauvaises Pensées et Autres

  I. A SUNRISE ON THE ATLANTIC

  AS HE BORE a vague resemblance to the Emperor, the sailors on board the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer had nicknamed him Napoleon. And so, for convenience, that is what we shall call him.

  Besides, he was Napoleon.

  How the Emperor’s escape from St. Helena eventually succeeded during the last stage of an extraordinarily ingenious plot is a story that has already been narrated elsewhere (see “The Prisoner of St. Helena” in Fireside Stories, June/ July 1904). Suffice it to recall here the main outline of the stratagem: a humble and loyal sergeant who, in the past, had often served as a double of the Emperor was dropped on a beach of St. Helena one moonless night; simultaneously, Napoleon boarded a Portuguese seal-hunting lugger that had been chartered for this daring venture.

  For the English jailers (as well as for the rest of the world) the next day was very much like any other day. Napoleon got up at the usual time, drank his customary chocolat, played (and cheated) at patience, and took his constitutional according to daily routine. Except for a tiny handful of devoted servants who were involved in the conspiracy, no one knew that these various activities were being performed by a double, and that the genuine Napoleon was sailing on the sealer that was to bring him a few weeks later to the island of Tristan da Cunha—a desolate rock, uninhabited except for a few penguins and other wretched natives whose description we shall spare the reader.

  From Tristan da Cunha, he was given a berth on a crayfish schooner bound for Cape Town. At no stage of his journey was anything left to his initiative; every move had been minutely planned for him, and each time he was notified of it at the last moment, by a series of anonymous agents, themselves mere cogs that fitted blindly into a huge, mysterious machine. This second leg of the journey had been long and rough. He was traveling under the name of Eugène Lenormand; at the time, however, his assumed identity had little practical use: the crew of the schooner was made up of Norwegians who would never have considered speaking to him. This attitude did not reflect any ill will on their part—they were no more talkative among themselves—the fact is, after years of seafaring, these Scandinavian mutes had lost all aptitude for social intercourse. As a result, the resemblance—somewhat vague yet still discernible—which the newcomer presented to the hero who had shaken Europe and the world was not likely to provoke any embarrassing curiosity. And anyway, the only crowned head that was faintly familiar to the crew was that of a Danish king whose lithographic portrait was yellowing on the bulkhead in the forecastle.

  Now, however, on the third and last leg of his journey, the situation had entirely changed. On board the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer—the brig that was at last carrying him back to France—the sailors were a fairly sophisticated collection of cosmopolitan scoundrels. They were not entirely devoid of culture générale: what is more, the boatswain was a Frenchman who had served on the Egyptian expedition and persisted in professing his Bonapartist religion. Yet, of all the crew, he would have been the most reluctant to acknowledge that there could be the slightest resemblance between his god and the new cabin hand (for it was in this capacity that Napoleon appeared on the roll).

  It all began with a cheeky remark from the ship’s boy.

  One morning, as the boy had to carry astern the officers’ breakfast trays, he called out to the cabin hand to come and help him. As the latter remained lost in his perpetual daydreams, the boy, who was observant and not without wit, finally shouted, “Ahoy! Napoleon!”

  The effect far exceeded his expectations. The man leaped to his feet as if lashed with a whip. For a fraction of a second, his eyes lit up with the fearsome intensity of a wild animal caught in a trap. Although the boy was still young, life at sea and the rough company of the crew had already endowed him with a fair dose of cynicism; therefore, Eugène’s brief metamorphosis did not overly impress him—he merely noted what appeared to be a fairly efficient method of bringing the cabin hand back to earth. As, in his daily chores, he frequently needed th
e other’s assistance, he found the use of this new nickname very expedient.

  The rest of the crew, continually hearing “Napoleon!” here, “Napoleon!” there, eventually ratified the vague resemblance there might have been between the cabin hand and the prisoner of St. Helena; thus, for everyone in the forecastle, he became Napoleon from then on.

  The boatswain alone found the joke to be in very poor taste. That any form of association could be established between his idol and this ugly little man, with his potbelly and knotty knees, was sacrilege to him. It must also be said that Napoleon had aged considerably over the last few years; he had lost most of his hair and, to protect his head from the cold sea wind, had taken to wearing a woolen cap which his landlady on Tristan da Cunha had knitted for him in a mixture of gaudy colors. This comfortable but slightly ridiculous hat added the last touch to a silhouette the very sight of which was enough to irritate the boatswain.

  The latter’s exasperation was further exacerbated by the seeds of irritation repeatedly sown by the supercargo—an insolent young man, the son of a Birmingham solicitor, who had been banished to the high seas, having impregnated a parson’s daughter. This odious Englishman, knowing the boatswain’s devotion to the Bonapartist cause, took a perverse delight in addressing the wretched cabin hand with mock courtesy as “Monsieur de Buonaparte” whenever the boatswain was within earshot.

  These indirect insults to his idol filled the boatswain with a rage which he usually vented upon the unfortunate Eugène. There were plenty of opportunities, for the cabin hand, being no good at anything, was obliged to do everything—there was no mindless, humiliating, or dirty task that did not eventually fall on his shoulders. Even the ship’s boy had the cheek to unload some of his duties onto him.

  Naturally, he was denied the essential dignity of the topmen, who, during their watches, could escape from the suffocating heat below decks, and, in the swaying of the spars and billowing whiteness of the sails, became like weightless giants, brothers of the seabirds in the wind. His physical debility chained him to the deck. Yet, what did it matter to him if he was a mere insect in the eyes of those aloft? He rarely looked up, even absentmindedly, in their direction. He endured his abject state with complete stoicism, making no attempt to evade his present condition. He was beyond all humiliation: his real self existed elsewhere, in a cold lucid dream flying to meet the future, toward France and empires still to come!

  As everyone knows, sailors are a rough lot, but not mean-spirited. They tolerated him, paying as little attention to him as to the parrot of the cook Nigger-Nicholas. As long as he did as he was told, they had no quarrel with him. In actual fact, although they did not feel the slightest respect for him, something prevented them from bullying him. Was it his aloofness, his obstinate silence that created a certain distance, or his plump white hands, like a bishop’s, that gave him a mysterious dignity? Perhaps they simply took pity on his physical weakness and his prodigious ineptitude in performing any sort of manual work.

  The only creature to show him genuine consideration was Nigger-Nicholas. Not that this meant very much, as Nigger-Nicholas called everyone “Boss,” even his own parrot.

  No one knew exactly how old Nigger-Nicholas was. His appearance was quite loathsome. He was tall, but a good half century spent bending over stoves in low-ceilinged galleys had broken him up into several angular segments, like a half-folded pocket rule. Without really being fat, his body swelled out arbitrarily in places, giving him the shape of a semi-deflated balloon. His face was split by a huge gaping mouth; in this grotto, as black and dirty as the maw of his stove, there emerged one or two teeth, like slimy rocks protruding at low tide. The ruined state of his teeth made his speech, already bizarre, all the harder to understand, endowing his rare utterances with a kind of oracular force—as befits a black cook on a sailing ship who, to be true to type, must naturally have a smattering of occult sciences.

  Napoleon paid no attention to the boatswain’s hostility or the supercargo’s sarcasm, and he ignored the brutish indifference of the sailors as well as the impertinence of the ship’s boy. But he was equally unaware of the favors which Nigger-Nicholas regularly bestowed on him, and which inspired a certain amount of envy all round. As the cook can dispense a number of much-sought-after privileges—a juicy piece of crackling here, a pig’s trotter there, a spot close to the stove for drying socks, a drop of hot coffee before going out on the dogwatch, etc.—he is always surrounded by a crowd of sycophants seeking his favors. Napoleon benefited from these various acts of kindness without doing a thing to earn them. He accepted them as his due, and most of the time did not even appear to notice them. The strange thing is that, far from discouraging Nigger-Nicholas, this very indifference seemed to increase his solicitude.

  Every evening, crushed by the fatigue of the day’s work, Napoleon would escape for a moment from the stuffy atmosphere of the forecastle and lean against the bulwark in the bows to watch the first stars come out. The softness of the tropical azure giving way slowly to the velvet of night, and the glittering of the lonely stars which seem so close to us when they begin to shine in the dusk, left him perfectly cold. He came and stood there purely for the sake of his health; he merely wished to refresh his body, relax his muscles, clear his lungs, and make sure of a good night’s sleep.

  If he cared so little for the magnificence of tropical sunsets, it was not because he was naturally insensitive to romantic grand operas. On the contrary! Yet, ever since the momentous night of his escape from St. Helena, he had decided to protect himself behind an impenetrable shell of indifference. At this stage of his uncertain journey “Napoleon” could be nothing more than a shipboard nickname, a grotesque joke of the forecastle.

  At that very moment, it was an obscure army sergeant who was cast in the role of the wounded eagle, of the solitary prisoner, of the tragic exile, while the true Emperor existed only as a vision of the future. Between the persona he had shed, and the one he had not yet created, he was no one. For a time, Eugène would have to fill this blank interval with his mediocre existence; he had no right to a destiny of his own; at most he could be granted inglorious little misfortunes and a few petty pleasures.

  Thus, he had to deny himself the intoxicating splendors of these sunsets for as long as he remained cut off from his true self, cast off from his own fate, left hanging in this halfway void, forgotten, between sea and sky, in the dull emptiness of this slow boat, among coarse sailors.

  During this time in limbo, and until the day when Napoleon’s sun would rise again, he had to survive by relying upon wretched Eugène’s purely physical existence.

  Only the slenderest thread was leading him back toward the hypothetical dawn of his future. So far, at every stage of his journey, a new, unknown messenger had emerged from the shadows to show him the route to follow.

  For the time being, all he knew were the instructions that had been given to him at the last port of call: when the Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer arrived in Bordeaux, he should look on the wharf for a man with a mustache, wearing a gray top hat, sitting on a barrel, holding a furled umbrella in one hand and a copy of the Financial Herald in the other. This new contact would guide him to the huge secret organization that had been prepared to propel him back into power, and which needed only one spark of his genius to be set in motion.

  He still had no idea how this organization worked, and none of his successive guides had been able to enlighten him on the subject; in fact, the fundamental rule of this amazing plot was to observe such absolute secrecy that the conspirators themselves did not know the very object of their association. Although the membership could already be counted in tens of thousands, no two members knew each other. Under such conditions, they naturally had no way of learning that the author of this gigantic scheme—an obscure young mathematician—had already departed this world two years earlier, carried off by brain fever! However, the complex mechanism that his brilliant mind had designed was so perfect, and every detail had been pl
anned with such precision, that the wheels kept blindly turning day after day, month after month, without being affected in the slightest by the disappearance of their anonymous creator.

  IN SPITE OF his firm resolve to keep Eugène strictly confined within the limits of his temporary role, there was one occasion when Napoleon’s vigilance was caught off guard. The incident seemed trifling, but it was to leave a scar that was deeper than he probably realized at the time.

  The Hermann-Augustus Stoeffer had crossed the Tropic a few days earlier and had now entered the zone where the trade winds were pushing her along steadily. With all her canvas up, the brig was sailing beautifully, heeling under a strong warm breeze which blew with such regularity that the crew hardly ever had to brace the yards. The watches were leisurely; it was as if the boat had made a pact with wind and sea, and had taken charge of the whole operation, leaving the sailors with little to do. And so the journey continued, night and day, sailing home on wings in this state of blessed truce with the elements.

  One night, Eugène was awoken by a strong hand shaking his shoulder. Still sleepy, in the dim light of the hurricane lamp that burned night and day in the forecastle, he made out the grinning features of Nigger-Nicholas, who was leaning over him. The cook, in a state of happy excitement, signaled him to get up and follow him right away.

  Eugène would have preferred to go back to sleep. What on earth did this boisterous brute want with him in the middle of the night? But he had learned to be docile, and he would have meekly taken orders from the ship’s boy himself. He tumbled out of his hammock, and still half-asleep, he staggered after Nigger-Nicholas to the ladder leading to the hatchway.

  In the pale rectangle of sky outlined by the half-open hatch, he could see that, contrary to what he had first thought, night was almost over.