The monotony of life on the island affected everyone, and Napoleon’s entourage could not hide their longing to leave. Gourgaud, who had grown neurotic and constantly feuded with Montholon, left in March 1818. Although it was something of a relief to be spared his mawkish tantrums, it further diminished Napoleon’s court. The Balcombes left the same month, which upset him, as even though he had been seeing less of them recently they were a friendly presence, and Betsy always cheered him when she called. A more affecting loss was the death from appendicitis of Cipriani, whom Napoleon was fond of and who had managed to maintain a certain standard when it came to his table.
Napoleon was grateful to the Anglican chaplain who consented to give him a Christian burial and sent him the gift of a gold snuffbox. Hearing of this, Lowe forced the chaplain to return it, on the grounds that it represented an attempt by the prisoner to bribe a British official. When, as the Balcombes were about to leave, Napoleon wished to give their Malay slave Toby, whom he had befriended when staying with them, the money to buy his freedom, he was prevented from doing so on the grounds that he was fomenting a slave rebellion. Lowe did not give a political reason for not allowing the piano at Longwood to be tuned, but he did find a sinister one behind Montholon’s offer to the French commissioner Montchenu of some beans, explaining in a report to Bathurst that Montchenu should only have accepted the white ones, since white was the colour of the Bourbons, and refused the green ones, since green was associated with Napoleon, the implication being that the commissioner was politically unsound.27
Three months after O’Meara had been sent away, Napoleon fell ill. Bertrand requested a replacement, but the governor did not believe there was anything wrong with Napoleon, and offered to send one of the available military and naval medics. Napoleon refused, on the grounds that they would be no more than the governor’s spies. He kept to his bedroom, which meant the British officer who was supposed to establish his presence twice a day could not see him, despite trying to peer through cracks in the shutters. Lowe insisted he be admitted into his bedroom. Napoleon refused. Lowe suggested sending a doctor to ascertain his presence. Napoleon would not admit him. Lowe threatened to have the door broken down, and Napoleon did eventually allow John Stokoe, surgeon of HMS Conqueror, to examine him. In January 1819 Stokoe diagnosed severe hepatitis, and was ill-treated by Lowe, arrested and dismissed, the governor being convinced that his captive was shamming. In April, Napoleon sent a plea to the prime minister Lord Liverpool through a relative of his who was passing through, but he too was persuaded by Lowe that there was nothing wrong with him.28
Bertrand contrived to contact Fesch in Rome, with a request for a doctor and a Catholic priest. Neither Fesch nor Letizia liked spending money (though she had sent her son some), and she appears to have been convinced by a soothsayer that Napoleon had been spirited away from St Helena and was safe in some undisclosed location; they therefore selected two decrepit Corsican priests and a young doctor with little experience who came cheap. The three of them reached the island in September 1819, and on the Sunday following their arrival, mass was celebrated in the sitting room of Longwood. Napoleon had the now largely redundant dining room turned into a chapel, and henceforth attended mass every Sunday.29
Albine de Montholon had left that summer, taking her children with her, and her husband was desperate to follow. The Bertrands were also keen to get back to Europe, and Napoleon, who understood their predicament but felt he could not do without the moral support of at least one high-ranking officer, considered finding replacements among his old faithfuls such as Savary and Caulaincourt. He was deluding himself if he thought they would be allowed to come; Pauline had sought permission without success, and in the previous year Jérôme and his wife Catherine had written to Lord Liverpool and the Prince Regent begging to be allowed to visit Napoleon, only to meet with refusal. In the event, he was coming to depend more on the twenty-eight-year-old Marchand, for whom he felt great affection and whom he called ‘mon fils’, and who cared for him with truly filial devotion.30
Although he was now gravely ill, he had moments of enthusiasm and activity; towards the end of 1819 he decided to take more exercise and, spade in hand, took up gardening, which he seemed to enjoy. In January 1820 he went out for a ride, which laid him low for several days, and he repeated the exercise in May. That summer he drove out for a picnic, but on his return had to be carried into the house, and by the autumn he was in the terminal stages of what was either cancer or gastric haemorrhage due to his stomach wall being perforated by ulcers. The Corsican doctor sent by Fesch and Letizia, Francesco Antommarchi, was out of his depth and remarkably feckless with it, but there was little he could have done.31
Napoleon no longer left the house, and often not even his room, not bothering to shave on some days. He had grown very weak and unsteady, tripping over a rat in his room on one occasion, and fainted if he made an effort. He suffered from sweats and fevers, and vomited frequently, and by the end of the year it was clear to all around him that he was dying. Lowe refused to believe it, and kept insisting on his presence being verified by a British officer, again threatening forcible entry. Dr Thomas Arnott, surgeon of the regiment which had taken over to guard the ogre, was admitted at the beginning of April 1821; he confirmed that Napoleon was still there, and reported that there was nothing much wrong with his health.32
In the last week of April Napoleon was vomiting blood and complaining of searing pain in his side. He asked for his bed to be moved to the drawing room, which had more light and air. He was growing weaker, and seemed to lose consciousness at times; on 29 April he muttered incomprehensibly about ‘France’, ‘the army’ and ‘Josephine’, and then about bequeathing his house in Ajaccio and the Salines to his son. On 3 May he was given extreme unction by one of his Corsican chaplains, Abbé Vignali, whom he instructed to follow the French royal tradition of the ‘chapelle ardente’, a lying-in-state with mass celebrated daily. By the next day he was delirious, and at around ten minutes before six on the evening of 5 May 1821 he died.33
On hearing of Napoleon’s death, the Italian poet Alessandro Manzoni felt a sense of shock and a powerful urge to write. He sat down and in the space of two days composed one of his greatest works, Il Cinque Maggio, an ode in which he portrays the deceased emperor as a heroic and superhuman being whose death he likens to that of Christ on Golgotha, since it raises him to immortality. Goethe, who translated the ode into German, also made analogies between Napoleon and Christ, and his continuing fascination with the emperor’s Promethean nature had a profound influence on his work, particularly on his masterpiece, Faust. Napoleon’s talent for self-promotion had yielded its highest achievement.
‘He was neither good nor bad, neither just nor unjust, neither mean nor generous, neither cruel nor compassionate; he was wholly political,’ wrote Matthieu Molé, who had worked closely with him for years. That was as true of his death as of his life. When he felt death approaching, on 12 April Napoleon began dictating his last will and testament, which he would later laboriously copy out in his own hand, as his Code demands. It was to be much more than just a will. It expressed affection for his family, to whom he left no money, only personal mementos. It bequeathed his heart in an urn and a lock of his hair to Marie-Louise (who would refuse to accept them). It rewarded seventy-six of his most faithful friends and followers, high and low. It gave generous grants to the men who had followed him to Elba, to foreign soldiers who had fought for France, and to the wounded of Waterloo. As he did not possess a fraction of the sums necessary, he effectively turned tens of thousands of people into creditors of the French government, and therefore enemies of the Bourbons. The document is a political manifesto around which supporters of his son and the Bonaparte dynasty could unite.34
It opens with a number of declarations, about himself, his family and his country, and states that he is dying, ‘assassinated by the British government and its hired executioner’. He had been working on this theme from the moment
he reached St Helena, representing himself as a martyr, and he was unfailingly assisted by Hudson Lowe to the very end – he was buried in a picturesque spot about a mile from Longwood, but his gravestone was left blank, because the governor would not permit any inscription suggesting imperial status, and neither Bertrand nor Montholon would allow ‘General Buonaparte’.35
Two years after his death, Las Cases published his Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, an account of the emperor’s slow martyrdom after Waterloo, a best-seller which spread the gospel of Napoleon throughout the world. The spirit of the age was highly receptive, and poets across Europe and beyond embraced Napoleon’s carefully crafted propaganda. ‘Britannia! you own the sea,’ wrote the German poet Heinrich Heine. ‘But the sea has not water enough to wash away the disgrace that this great man bequeathed to you as he died.’36
Napoleon had finally triumphed over his British enemy, and in the process he had achieved something else. From his earliest years he had sought role models and braced his ego by casting himself in the image of a Hannibal, Alexander, Caesar or Charlemagne, but after briefly considering Themistocles, he had lighted upon an entirely new model, one just as mythical as any of the others, which would gain far greater resonance than all of them put together – that of Napoleon the godlike genius who, misunderstood, betrayed and martyred by lesser men, would triumph over death and live on to haunt the imagination and inspire future generations; he had begun a new life as a myth.
Notes
N.B. In some cases I have used different editions of the same title, because I have worked on this book in different places and the same edition was not always available
Preface
1. Franz Grillparzer, Sämmtliche Werke, vol. I, Stuttgart 1872, 192–4
2. Beyle, Vie de Napoléon, 1; see also Salvatorelli; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 257
3. Bodinier, 328–9; see also Lefèbvre, 207; Lignereux, 213
1: A Reluctant Messiah
1. Bailleu, I/163; Williams, 8–9
2. Staël, Considérations, XIII/192–3; Bourrienne, 1831, II/216; see also Jomard, 17–18
3. Espitalier, 52; Bailleu, I/165; Dumont Romain, 2
4. Recueil, 3
5. Recueil, 4; Dumont Romain, 3; Staël, Considérations, XIII/199; Bailleu, I/164; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 257
6. Williams, 8–9; Espitalier, 50
7. Recueil, 4; Espitalier, 49
8. Mallet du Pan, II/356; Espitalier, 56–7; Bourrienne, 1831, II/216; Mallet du Pan, II/371–2
9. Recueil, 6
10. Staël, Considérations, XIII/199; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 310; Napoleon, Mémoires, I/507
11. Recueil, 7
12. Ibid., 9
13. Ibid., 13
14. Ibid., 18
15. Ibid., 23
16. Bailleu, I/155
17. Ibid., 159; Bourrienne, 1831, II/219; Pontécoulant, II/489
18. Dumont Romain, 4; Recueil, 25; Pasquier, I/134
19. Bailleu, I/162; Espitalier, 143–7
20. Espitalier, 62; Mallet du Pan, II/384; Bailleu, I/167
21. Waresquiel, 232
2: Insular Dreams
1. Branda, Secrets, 25–7 (Gerard Lucotte’s study)
2. Defranceschi, 46–60; see also Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon; Paoli, Jeunesse; Carrington, Portrait, 17; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 27
3. Vergé-Franceschi, Paoli, 183–283
4. Vergé-Franceschi, Paoli, 183–4, 188, 283, 295, 9; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 73; Boswell
5. There are differences of opinion on the subject. See: Simiot, 5; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 29; Branda, Le Prix, 19–20; Carrington, Napoleon, 14, 19–20; Carrington, Portrait, 11–14; Charles Napoléon, 66; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 43–51, 55ff; Bartel, 17
6. There is no evidence for the story in Carrington, Portrait, 15–17, 26–8; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 54, 73; Paoli, 27, etc., of Carlo going to Rome and living it up there
7. Boswell, 96
8. On the alleged authorship of the proclamation, see: Carrington, Portrait, 37; Paoli, 29; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 76. See also: Carrington, Napoleon, 78, 44–5; Vergé-Franceschi, Paoli, 376; Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 41
9. Paoli, 30–1; Carrington, Portrait, 46, 42–3; Carrington, Napoleon, 43
10. Versini, 21; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 90, 95; Carrington, Portrait, 43
11. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 30; on stories surrounding his birth, see also: Charles Napoléon, 92; Carrington, Napoleon; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 13
12. Versini, 26; Carrington, Napoleon, 53–5; Defranceschi, 70
13. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 107–11, 121; Carrington, Portrait, 58; Versini, 33
14. Bartel, 38; Versini, 60–1; Carrington, Portrait, 48
15. Carrington, Portrait, 50–2
16. Paoli, 43
17. Carrington, Portrait, 57, 55–6; Carrington, Napoleon, 65, 78
18. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 48; Versini, 86; Charles Napoléon, 98; Defranceschi, 72
19. Versini, 64; Bartel, 40–3; Charles Napoléon, 105; Carrington, Portrait, 66, 72–3; Carrington, Napoleon, 103
20. Larrey, Madame Mère, 528–9; Masson, Jeunesse, 36; Chuquet, I/50; Bertrand, Cahiers, 1818–1819, 137
21. Larrey, Madame Mère, 528, 530
22. Larrey, Madame Mère, 529; see also: Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 294–5; Paoli, 45, 50; Chuquet, I/78; Defranceschi, 79–80
23. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 319; Carrington, Portrait, 48–9
24. The story that he travelled through Italy, related by Coston, I/17–18, has been disproved by Versini, 78–9; Marcaggi, 65; Carrington, Paoli and others
25. Masson, Napoléon Inconnu, I/49
26. Defranceschi, 82
3: Boy Soldier
1. Bartel, 61; Masson, Napoléon Inconnu, I/54
2. Paoli, 68–73; Chuquet, I/113–14
3. Bartel, 62–4
4. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 335
5. Some Account, 24; Bartel, 259; Bourrienne, 1829, I/25. Des Mazis seems to place this at the École Militaire; see also Thiard, 51–2
6. Belly de Bussy, 235; Some Account, 27, 13
7. Bourrienne, 1829, I/30; Bartel, 255; Gourgaud, I/252–3
8. Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/xx; Some Account, 29–31; Chuquet, I/118, 129
9. Carrington, Napoleon, 103; Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 49; Versini, 72–4; Defranceschi, 85–6
10. Vergé-Franceschi, Napoléon, 50; Versini, 74–6
11. Garros, 25; Tulard & Garros, 20–1
12. Carrington, Napoleon, 129; Versini, 174–6; Defranceschi, 72
13. Bertrand, Cahiers, 1818–1819, 136–7
14. Napoleon, Correspondance Générale, (henceforth CG), I/43–4
15. Ibid.; Lucien Bonaparte, I/24–5
16. Bartel. 87
17. Paoli, 84; Tulard & Garros, 24
18. Masson, Jeunesse, 110; Chuquet, I/200–3; Bartel, 119
19. Chuquet, I/200ff.; Bartel, 107ff; Masson, Jeunesse, 90–1; Bien, 69–98
20. Marcaggi, 62; CG, I/49; Pachoński, 243–6
21. CG, I/45. See also Las Cases, 1905, I/94
22. The supposedly prophetic story of Carlo crying out as he was dying that Napoleon would avenge him (Chuquet, I/212; Joseph, Mémoires, I/29) can be safely dismissed
23. CG, I/47
24. Masson, Jeunesse, 113
25. Bartel, 255–6
26. Ibid., 256, 258, 136
27. Ibid., 258, 257
28. Ibid., 257–8
29. Marcaggi, 67; see also Claire de Rémusat, Mémoires, I/267
30. Bartel, 79, 256, 259, 261; Avallon, 10–17; Las Cases, 1905, I/95
31. Masson, Jeunesse, 129, 139; see also Abrantès, I/112–13
32. Bartel, 260
4: Freedom
1. Paoli, 108–9; Simiot, 39–40
2. Las Cases, 1905, I/100
3. Bartel, 148–9, 261; Paoli, 113; Las Cases, 1905, I/102; Masson, Napoléon et les Femmes, 8
4. Paoli, 112
, 109; Beyle, Vie de Napoléon, 28; Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/xxi
5. Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/37–8
6. Paoli, 102; Joseph, Mémoires, I/33
7. Ibid., 32–3; Charles Napoléon, 137–8; Paoli, 128, 133
8. Paoli, 133, 138; Garros, 32; see also Branda, Le Prix, 19–20
9. Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/68–9; Joseph, Mémoires, I/38
10. Branda, Secrets, 35
11. Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/55–6
12. Paoli, 163; CG, I/65; Chuquet, I/308; Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/85ff
13. Paoli, 29–30, 247, 43–9
14. Ibid., 67, 237, 451
15. CG, I/67, 70; Simiot, 50; Bartel, 261
16. CG, I/68, 72, 74; Thiard, 37–8
17. Chuquet, I/357; CG, I/72–3
18. CG, I/74, 72
19. Ibid., 76; Napoleon, Oeuvres, I/67, II/53 (according to Defranceschi, 20–1, the text was later heavily doctored by Napoleon)
20. Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/69; Masson, Jeunesse, 196
21. CG, I/77, 78–9; Coston, II/92–3
22. CG, I/81
23. Paoli, 178; Coston, 92–3
5: Corsica
1. Masson, Napoléon Inconnu, II/107–15
2. Paoli, 193; Garros, 41
3. CG, I/83; Paoli, 198; Chuquet, II/103; Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/70. See also Defranceschi, 126
4. Chuquet, II/129–34; CG, I/84
5. Gueniffey, Bonaparte, 86; Chuquet, II/103, 109
6. Marcaggi, 134, 162, breaks this down into two events, placing the confrontation in the Olmo in July, which is almost certainly wrong; Masson, Napoléon Inconnu, II/107–15
7. Masson, 105–6; Chuquet, II/110–24. The story of Napoleon making a sarcastic remark about Paoli’s command at Ponte Novo can be dismissed
8. CG, I/89; Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/133–5
9. Paoli, 198; CG, I/97; Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/133–5
10. CG, I/100
11. Ibid., 97
12. Masson, Jeunesse, II/349
13. Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/225ff, 229, 231
14. Chuquet, II/217; Masson, Jeunesse, II/262; Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/254
15. Napoleon, Oeuvres, II/243, 249, 260, 293–4
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