by Tom Keneally
About the Book
Keneally’s gift, and his blessing to the many hundreds of characters he has created, is always to find the extraordinary within the ordinary
The Australian
When Tom Keneally discovered by chance at the National Gallery of Victoria that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while the Emperor Napoleon was exiled there, had become the Emperor’s ‘intimate friend and annoyer’, and had then emigrated with her family to Australia, he was impelled to begin another extraordinary novel, exploring the intersection between the ordinary people of the world and those we deem exceptional.
Betsy Balcombe moved as a child with her family to St Helena, ‘that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile’. Ten years later her family befriended, served and were ruined by their relationship with Napoleon. To redeem their fortunes William Balcombe, Betsy’s father, betrayed the Emperor and accepted a job as the colonial treasurer of New South Wales, taking his family with him. After enduring a profound tragedy on the voyage out, and never quite recovering from the results of his association with Napoleon, William’s life deteriorated; however, his family struggled and survived in Australia.
Tom Keneally recreates Betsy’s friendship with The Great Ogre, her enmities and alliances with his court, and her dramatic coming of age during her years with them on the island. With his ability for bringing historical stories to life in the most brilliant and surprising ways, Keneally vividly shares this remarkable tale and the beginning of an Australian dynasty.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Terre Napoléon
After the Island
Our Balcombe family
Before OGF
A deliberate exercise in dizzying cliffs …
To the side of the long lawn …
Lack of educational and social polish …
The last day of my accustomed life …
Advent
Unkind to those who sought sleep …
Expiring at the first sight …
Contemplating what person he was …
Two French ladies down in Jamestown …
Walking in the hinterland …
The contradictions of the Emperor’s nature …
Sportiveness
Day for translations …
Antic regions of the soul …
‘Escape’, or any other word of that meaning …
Was it a Man of Reason or a clown …?
Consider the burden …
More solidly caged there …
Name and Nature
Built to return things in kind …
As an aunt watching a heedless nephew …
The possessor of the bust of …
Against the killing draughts of salt …
Not a curative environment …
Some huge ugly insect in the heart of Africa …
Sunk in herculean matter …
An appropriate toxin …
Agreed to quit the island …
Collect us at The Briars …
After-Payment
Explaining-himself sessions …
To whom I was married …
Knocking of a polite rhythm …
A French sailor called it that …
Some final notes on Betsy, the incompleteness of the account and remaining unnegotiable mysteries
Also by Tom Keneally
Copyright Notice
Terre Napoléon
To me it was a discovery, though it was known to others. On a steely winter’s day in 2012 I was ‘doing publicity’ for a book of mine in the city of Melbourne and following a radio interview, the book publicist, a young veteran named Karen Reid, and I were offered tickets by the studio for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. There we visited a collection of Napoleon’s garments, uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, snuffboxes, military decorations and memorabilia.
Melbourne happens to be the capital city of the state of Victoria, but fourteen years before the queen honoured by that name was even born, a French naval explorer, Nicholas Baudin, sent to Australia by Napoleon, reached Sydney in a period of peace between the Great Powers, having surveyed the coast of the later-named Victoria and labelled it Terre Napoléon.
There is something ruthlessly enchanting about Napoleon. We are told he was a tyrant but we do not listen. We hear him labelled with the ‘Hitler’ tag, but it does not take root. Counting in the blood and waste and all, the late phases of the French Revolution, the Consulate and then the Empire have an ineffable style, in ideas and new politics, in art and human venturing, which still compel our imaginations. Style in clothing, too. For there were women’s garments (Josephine’s and Marie-Louise’s) in the exhibition and I, like the Englishwomen of the island of St Helena when they saw the two exiles, Albine de Montholon and Fanny Bertrand, believed these could not have been reproduced by anyone who was not French and of that period. I was as bowled over by what I saw on the mannequins in the NGV as the population of St Helena was in 1815 by those two friends and companions of the exiled Emperor.
The furniture the Emperor and Josephine had commissioned from Jacob Frères, who might have come as close to heaven in their creations as any furniture-makers of history, was interspersed with porcelain and plate and paintings by Jacques-Louis David. We people of the globe’s southernmost regions are used to going to Europe on interminable, brain-numbing flights to gawp at such items, but to be able to do it in Australia was a delight. For everything in here came from Europe, surely – that was my post-colonial assumption. It turned out not to be the case. Some of the material, including a Légion d’honneur, a swatch of the Emperor’s hair, and a death mask of the man showing the mutilation of his head, were from an 1840s homestead named The Briars, located thirty kilometres away from Melbourne on the lovely Mornington Peninsula − a rectangular limb of earth that stretches south-east out of the city and ends in a narrow foot, which runs west to include Port Phillip Bay on its instep. That was where the Emperor’s mask of mutilation came from!
And there, in the catalogue, was a name. Betsy Balcombe. Someone called Betsy was a familiar of the Emperor? And ended up in Australia? And her family had brought Napoleon relics with them, and the relics had been added to by a wealthy descendant.
So items from down the road had a connection with a young girl who had lived on St Helena when the Emperor was stuck on that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile, and who – it was said – had become his intimate friend and annoyer. On St Helena the Emperor specialised in giving people he liked enamelled snuffboxes and other mementos, including – in the case of the Balcombe family – a Sèvres plate painted with battle scenes. And the Balcombes, ultimately exiled themselves, to Australia, had brought these memorabilia with them to O’Connell Street in Sydney and then into the Monaro bush and finally, with the most successful of the Balcombes, Betsy’s youngest brother Alex, to the Port Phillip region.
Alex’s robust and wealthy granddaughter Mabel Balcombe, who became a so-called leader of Melbourne society and was known as Dame Mabel Brookes − a woman born in 1890 and living until 1975 − had increased the collection by purchases made in Europe and elsewhere. And here were the Balcombe−Brookes items interspersed with those shipped especially from Europe for the exhibition. It may be worth mentioning that the husband of Dame Mabel, Norman Brookes, was the first non-resident Briton to win Wimbledon, and did it twice, in 1907 and on the lip of the conflagration in 1914. Sir Norman was a sportsman and sporting administrator, a businessman with financial and pastoral interests, an Anglophile and a supporter of private anti-Communist (that is, anti-malcontent) armies in the 1930s. That is, he should not have taken a shine to a man su
ch as the Emperor. What did he have in common with the Emperor?
Before I proceed to tell my construction of the story of that lethal charming, I must emphasise I am not myself a person who has ever carried a torch for the Emperor Napoleon. On the one hand, he produced the Code Napoléon. He was not a tyrant in the notable way of Roman Caesars and totalitarian leaders, more an enlightenment man and man of destiny, but in the twentieth century we would discover the foul places men of destiny could take us. I am an Australian bush republican and was involved in the attempt to make Australia a republic by purely amiable and constitutional means. So the word ‘emperor’ holds no allure for me, and I find Bonaparte’s pretension of becoming an emperor to save the Republic preposterous. I was always surprised the idea was accepted with enthusiasm by the revolutionary French (though Napoleon’s brother, brave Lucien, had his doubts).
But the story of the Emperor’s friendship with a girl who ended up in Australia, with a family destroyed by its association with said Emperor, gripped me. Australia was the nether world of the nineteenth century, as close to being another planet as was possible then. People, under a cloud in Europe, fetched up here or were sent – not convicts alone; two sons of Charles Dickens and one of Anthony Trollope, for example, plain non-academic Englishmen conveyed to a place where the rules were upside down and where even the feckless, it was believed, could find their fortune. The Balcombes were sent, damaged goods, from St Helena, with their Napoleon memorabilia, sentenced by no law court, but duped into it and conveniently excised from the main British polity. That’s a tale!
So how can an aged Australian writer credibly render a girl − and a Georgian one too − with the justice and the affection that, having read her journal, no doubt flawed like all journals, I feel for her?
As strong as was the impetus that arose from my encounter with Betsy’s journal, I felt impelled also by Surgeon Barry O’Meara’s two volumes on the experience of being the Emperor’s doctor and intimate. With his capacity for eloquence and palaver, his keen eye for the inhabitants of the island and his sense of grievance, burning with a furious vivid flame on the Emperor’s behalf, O’Meara inveigled me.
The journals of the Emperor’s friends on the island, Comte Las Cases, General Gourgaud, Comte de Montholon and that of the valet, Marchand, did not temper the fascination. Neither did the Cahiers of General Bertrand, nor the polished reports written by the Russian Count Balmain.
Secondary sources that tried to interpret the conundrum of Napoleon on St Helena include Desmond Gregory, Napoleon’s Jailer, Lt. General Sir Hudson Lowe, A Life and Clement Shorter (ed.), Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers, and others too numerous to name.
This fiction purports to be a secret journal, the one hidden behind the real one published in 1844. Like Betsy’s, it plays fast and loose with the strict historic chronology and suits its own convenience, but my no doubt mistaken intention is – in some way − to tell the truth by telling lies. I apologise to Betsy’s lively ghost for my impudence.
And as a last waiver, I do not subscribe to the theory that Napoleon was murdered on St Helena by Comte de Montholon, or anyone else. One murder mystery less, however, still leaves space for the abundant mysteries of St Helena, the answers to some of which I have made guesses appropriate to the novel, and have still been left with plenty of others that defy explanation.
AFTER THE ISLAND
Our Balcombe family
I had just met my husband-to-be when we had word from the Exmouth newspapers and from the harsh cries of coachmen that Our Great Friend had died on the island. This was of course impossible to believe, but we believed in it sufficiently to wail communally and privately. We saw all too sharply in our minds the rooms of Longwood, and that squat, exiled figure peering out of his windows towards the Barn, or Deadwood, or Diana’s Peak, in a manner that foretold a bewildered death. Old family wounds gaped anew, and ghosts of varying colorations were released.
Eventually, something like the true circumstances of that death came to us from the mouth of an old friend, the Irish surgeon Barry O’Meara. Even though the great loss had occurred, it was temporarily an invigorating thing for our Balcombe family to see O’Meara, up from London, flaws and all, and to look to him to interpret the event and help us drink the chalice of bereavement. When we sat by a fire on a rainy day in June at the Swan’s Nest, my father and the Irishman smoking pipes, and a bowl of punch before them, a couple of cups of which my mother was persuaded to take, we glowed with a familial anticipation that despite the circumstances felt like glee. To us, O’Meara had always been a sprite, so we felt strangely eased by the truth that he shared our onus of mourning.
He had arrived in our town the day before and sent us a note inviting us to the Swan’s Nest. When my father received it, he went sallow with rage. On the island he used to get rubicund with irritation, but in England he turned less healthy colours. In the letter O’Meara raised the question of his naval agent, Mr William Holmes, a man my father suspected of dishonour. Given the risks my father had taken in order to secretly ship off money drafts drawn by Our Great Friend, the idea that some had stuck to Holmes’s hands on the way to Laffitte’s bank in Paris was something odious. None, however, seemed to have stuck to O’Meara’s, and O’Meara defended his friend in any case, saying that Holmes was about to go to Paris to introduce himself to Laffitte and allay suspicions the bank harboured about the origin of the money bills. My father was not utterly convinced, yet in the flatness and desolation of our lives, we were still pleased to see the face of a fellow conspirator from the island, a face rendered greyer, and his grey suit, familiar from the island, older.
By then it was three weeks since the news of OGF’s death had come to us by way of the papers, and we were hungry for salient detail, to serve as palpable shelves on which we would stack our grief. Like soldiers of the Grande Armée, who had reportedly, on hearing the news, limped forth into town squares in France, looking about in shock, unable to accommodate themselves to the obliteration from the Earth of that Force, we too were shocked. The newspaper accounts, even the well-meaning, progressive scribes, did not always avoid false premises concerning the Emperor and his exile, and were unable to recount credibly what had happened at Longwood House weeks before, since none of them had ever seen the island. We were consoled by the honest accounts of the Morning Chronicle when it arrived in Exminster from London. The Chronicle had the advantage of sources amongst those not rancorous to the Emperor, his admirers and in some cases old friends. But we were appalled by other at best grudging reports, such as that in The Times, which purported to recount the death of a man we could not recognise from the text. All this had deepened our familial depression, of course. We had been suffering for allegiances and services of various kinds to a living Emperor, and now he was gone our suffering lacked meaning. Most of the time we crept about each other, being terribly kind, even me, the sort of kindness that confessed vacancy at our hearts, and a sense of the meaninglessness before us.
And then there came the letter from O’Meara promising to settle with my father the question of Holmes – and that he could give us the truth of OGF’s expiring. With these offers O’Meara raised hope that he might return to us our meaning. He told us he had heard from surgeons still on the island the circumstances of the Emperor’s death.
O’Meara drank up his cup of punch with relish, and that oval beaming face with the curly black hair now touched with grey and the smile seemed to revive before us, and thus a little of the island and the times of promise were restored. There was no layer of despair over his features. He was writing a book, and believed that would redeem him. My father served him a second cup with a ladle, and he raised it and said solemnly, ‘I propose a health to the memory of Our Great Friend, whose constitution was destroyed by the Fiend, Sir Hudson Lowe!’
Jane, my sister, and I were restricted to tea, and my brothers to cherry sodas. I suspected all at once, unlike our parents, who had been cosseted by the punch, that O’M
eara might alter things for us; that the Fiend and the island might now become the one dream, and that all the questions arising from that time might be swallowed in the ocean of OGF’s demise. But it could not happen until the matter and process of death was detailed for us.
‘I once took out a septic tooth from the Great Ogre,’ declared O’Meara. ‘A canine tooth. And now I scrape a crust of bread, and let me tell you it is a thin enough crust, out of the septic teeth of Edgeware Road – an Indian, Jewish and Arabian clientele by and large. I am limited to places beyond the eye of the College of Surgeons, and must proceed carefully and modestly if I am ever to be reinstated. And that is the work of Lowe by Name and Nature.’
‘Ah,’ my father said, warmed by the punch and by an animosity not native to him. ‘I know, though, that you write pieces in the Chronicle and The Times, Barry, still hammering that man, and justly so. And declaring other things as well.’
‘The men who read that don’t know I am a dental surgeon. The people from whom I draw teeth and the men who publish and read don’t know each other. It is incumbent upon me …’
Here the Irish surgeon realised he was speaking rather loudly, and dropped his voice, but there was still colour in his face, as if he were being criticised. ‘It is incumbent upon me to strike that fiend, Sir Hudson, who has violated all human expectation. None of it makes me a rich fellow, but it sustains me as a poor one.’