Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  The portrait of Betsy that is commonly reproduced—and is displayed for tourists at The Briars Pavilion—is of a conventionally beautiful young woman with a heart-shaped face and large blue eyes, her golden hair elaborately arranged, ringlets brushing her shoulders. Her dark dress is daringly décolleté. It is not the portrait of an adolescent girl, and nor was it painted by Catherine Younghusband, as has been suggested.24 It was adapted from a photograph of Betsy taken by G.W. Melliss in 1857, when she was Mrs Abell, a matron of 55.25 In a sketch from the photograph, her pose, dress and coiffure are almost identical. The portrait may have been executed by the Victorian artist Alfred Tidey, who also painted The Music Party in the 1850s, portraying Mrs Abell and her daughter at the piano in their London house.26

  Admiral Cockburn despatched two warships to take possession of the bare and unpopulated Ascension Island to foil any rescue attempt from there. He wrote to Croker at the Admiralty that he was impatient for the work at Longwood to be completed, as General Bonaparte had ‘expressed himself more dissatisfied with the lot decreed him than he did before . . . nothing shall ever be wanting on my part to render the General’s detention here as little afflictive and irksome to him as possible, so long as the paramount object of his personal security be not compromised’.27

  A large tent or marquee was pitched on the lawn at The Briars’ Pavilion to add more living space; it abutted against the permanent building as an extension of it and could be entered directly through one of the doors. It was a gift from Colonel Bingham, a veteran of the Peninsular War, Wellington’s lieutenant and now commander of all the troops on the island. Bonaparte was pleased: ‘One soldier understands another.’

  Cipriani the butler moved up from Jamestown, and he and Marchand spent the morning rearranging furniture. The marquee was divided into two compartments as study and dining room. The pavilion was assigned as Napoleon’s bedroom, containing the campaign bed and the silver washbasin on a stand opposite. The Las Cases father and son were now crammed together at night in one of the tiny loft spaces, and Cipriani was in the other.

  Cipriani, a fellow Corsican, had a long connection with the Buonaparte family; his wife was currently in Rome with the matriarch, Madame Mère, while his son was in service to Madame’s brother, Cardinal Fesch. Cipriani had been in exile with Napoleon on Elba and had helped facilitate his escape. A man of few words, alert and watchful, he occupied a special position in the household and was generally believed to be his master’s personal spy. He visited the shops and taverns and picked up information. Napoleon had complete confidence in him and showed it in a way that aroused jealousy among some of his courtiers.28

  At last Napoleon was in a position to entertain. Betsy and Jane were to be the first dinner guests. The girls arrived at the marquee on the stroke of nine and found Las Cases and Emmanuel standing stiffly to attention. The emperor entered with a formality that astonished Betsy, the star of his Légion d’Honneur flashing in the candlelight.29 Once seated, Napoleon began teasing the girls about their nation’s fondness for roast beef and stodgy plum pudding. He opined that English people were gluttons and drank far too much. Betsy responded that his countrymen lived on frogs. With no thought for decorum she jumped up from the table, ran down to the main house and returned a few moments later, waving a caricature from a magazine. It was labelled ‘A Frenchman’s dinner’ and showed a long, lean Frenchman, his mouth open and a frog on his tongue, ready to jump down his throat. Napoleon laughed and pinched her ear.

  The disapproval of Las Cases and his son was palpable. But Napoleon saw an opportunity to repay Betsy in kind. He had joked before that she would make a suitable wife for Emmanuel, the fourteen-year-old ‘le petit Las Cases’, and enjoyed her indignation: ‘Nothing enraged me so much; I could not bear to be considered such a child, and particularly at that moment, for there was a ball in prospect, to which I had great hopes Papa would allow me to go, and I knew that his objection would be founded on my being too young.’30 Napoleon insisted that young Emmanuel should kiss the girl and clasped her hands while the boy did as he was told. Betsy squirmed and, the moment her hands were free, boxed the ears of le petit Las Cases.

  As was his habit, Napoleon ate his meal quickly and abruptly terminated it, pushing his chair away from the table. Protocol obliged them all to put down their cutlery and rise to their feet. It had been arranged that after dinner they would join the senior Balcombes at the house for a game of whist. The party descended to the main house for the card game, walking in single file down the steep, narrow steps at the side. Napoleon led the way, followed by Las Cases, then his son, with Betsy bringing up the rear behind her sister. She lingered about ten yards behind, then ran with all her force onto Jane, who fell with extended hands onto le petit Las Cases, who in turn was thrown upon his father. The count, to his dismay and embarrassment, was pushed against Napoleon, who stumbled and just managed to stay upright.

  Betsy hooted with laughter at the confusion. But Las Cases was thunderstruck at the insult to his sovereign and his own loss of dignity. He seized the girl by the shoulders and pushed her violently onto the rocky bank. She burst into tears and cried: ‘Oh! Sir, he is hurting me!’

  ‘Never mind,’ Napoleon replied, ‘ne pleurs pas [don’t cry]—I will hold him while you punish him.’ He held onto his distinguished chamberlain while Betsy boxed the man’s ears until he begged for mercy. Napoleon released Las Cases, but only for more taunting, ordering him to run; if he could not run faster than the girl, he deserved to be beaten again. The little count skipped, breathless, around the lawn, frantic and humiliated, with Betsy after him, Napoleon laughing and clapping his hands. Of this episode Betsy concluded, unsurprisingly: ‘Las Cases never liked me after this adventure, and used to call me a rude hoyden.’31

  Perhaps Napoleon enjoyed these antics. But doubtless there was calculation on his part even amid the fun and silly games. He knew that accounts of them, received in London and even reported in The Times, made him seem sympathetic, humanised him: ‘Mr Balcombe has two smart young daughters, who talk the French language fluently, and to whom he is very much attached; he styles them his little pages. There is a number of little stories of the innocent freedoms they take, and how highly he is diverted by it.’32

  CHAPTER 7

  THE FRENCH SUITE

  I hung back behind the tour group and decided to take in the rest of the excursion on another day. At the side of the Pavilion I came down a flight of narrow stone steps leading to the garden—the same steep steps where Betsy had created havoc. The garden felt drowsy and peaceful, still dominated by two great yew trees and a date palm from the Balcombes’ time, but there were no fish in the small dank pond where the dog Tom Pipes had splashed about. Where the villa with its long, colonnaded verandah had stood there was a graceless concrete-block building and beyond it some rusting scaffolding and old cable drums in the grass, the remains of the cable and wireless headquarters.

  The canaries and Java sparrows Betsy described—brought by East India Company ships—had gone, but Indian mynahs flittered about in squabbling, fussy numbers. A former resident of The Briars was responsible for the preponderance of these drab little creatures all over the island: in 1868, Miss Phoebe Moss brought a cage of six mynahs from England and released them in The Briars’ garden, imagining they might feast on the invasive white ants. The crumbling ruin that the house became testified to the fact that they did not.

  Wandering across the grass, I picked up something that projected, shining, from a low rock wall—a curved shard of blue and white porcelain, a tiny piece of a cup, fragmented images of a teahouse and a fisherman in a boat, the willow pattern. It was probably part of a tea set brought from China on an East Indiaman. Perhaps Napoleon once drank from the cup. Or Madame Bertrand on one of her visits. I slipped it into my handbag.

  On 21 October, a carriage arrived, bringing General Gourgaud, the Bertrands and the Montholons from the boarding house in town to see the emperor’s accommodation at The Bria
rs.

  Lieutenant-General Henri Gatien, Comte de Bertrand, was, at the age of 42, a military man of vast experience, admired for his bravery and moral integrity. As the former grand marshal at the Tuileries palace, he was the most important person to have gone into exile with Napoleon, who said of him: ‘Bertrand is henceforth identified with my fate, he has become historical.’1 It was a sacrifice he volunteered for himself but imposed on his wife Fanny and their three small children.2 However, he had no choice but to leave France: he had been proscribed from re-entering the country and knew that a death sentence would follow.3 Marchand observed that Bertrand ‘cared little about the judgement against him, but it was not the same for the Countess, who not only feared for her husband, but for the future of her children as well’.4

  Betsy considered the Countess Bertrand the most distinguished woman she had ever seen, tall and upright in her bearing, her dress of the best Parisian quality but without ostentation. ‘I always thought every one else sank into insignificance when she appeared; and yet her features were not regular, and she had no strict pretensions to beauty, but the expressions on her face were very intellectual, and her bearing queen-like and dignified.’5 Mrs Balcombe found her gracious and was glad to converse in English, which Fanny spoke fluently, having been partly educated in England. The British side of her family claimed descent from the Plantagenets and Charles II.

  Françoise-Elisabeth (Fanny) Dillon was born on 24 July 1785 at a French chateau close to the Belgian border, although the first few years of her life were spent in the West Indies.6 Her grandfather Henry was an Irish peer who served in the military service of France’s ancien régime, as did her late father, the Honourable General Arthur Dillon, who was made a count of the French nobility.7 Most British Roman Catholics were prohibited from serving as officers in the British army or Royal Navy by the Test Act of 1673. Fanny’s father continued a century-long family tradition by committing to France as the commander of the Régiment de Dillon, part of the famous Irish Brigades founded in 1690 that fought with France in many wars in Europe, India and America. He served with distinction against the English during the American War of Independence and in the West Indies. Fanny’s mother, Laure, was from a Martinique planter family and was a cousin of Josephine de Beauharnais, the future empress.8

  A revolutionary tribunal condemned Arthur Dillon to death on 13 April 1794, and the following day he was sent to the guillotine together with seventeen other condemned persons, some of them distinguished by birth and others by crime. They were conveyed in common carts to the Place de la Révolution, where a crowd awaited them.9 Fanny was nine years old at the time of her father’s execution and was deeply traumatised by the horror; she grieved for him and remained a committed monarchist.

  In 1795, Fanny’s mother escaped with her to England. But with the advent of the Consulate, they felt confident they could return to France. Josephine, wife of First Consul Bonaparte, took an interest in Fanny, her attractive young relative who shared a Martinique background, and set about finding a good match for her.10 Napoleon’s loyal aide-de-camp, General Henri Gatien Bertrand, was smitten with the young woman. He has been described as ‘a little man, bald and thin, not much of a personality, a good engineer, an indifferent general but not lacking in courage; of unquestionable honesty, of quick understanding, of unconquerable obstinacy and of the best moral character’.11 Fanny was unimpressed and rebuffed his approaches. Bertrand, about to be made a divisional general and a Count of the Empire, was, according to another French historian, ‘an eminently marriageable man, by his position, his military bravery and competence, and by his moral qualities. But he had been living as a celibate. For two years he sighed in vain after the beautiful Fanny Dillon.’12 Napoleon, returning from Bayonne, ordered Fanny to settle for his aide-de-camp. She protested: ‘What, Sire, Bertrand . . . Bertrand! Imitator of the Pope by his mode of life!’ ‘That is enough, Fanny,’ Napoleon told her bluntly as he left the room.13

  In the end she had no option. Napoleon had often complained, ‘Too many of my generals married when they were corporals,’ resenting some of the vulgar officers’ wives at his receptions. He was determined that Bertrand should have the refined woman he desired. The couple were married in 1808—Fanny was 23 and her husband twelve years older—with Napoleon sending directives from the Erfurt battlefield, for ‘the great man had found time to rule on the most minute details of the wedding of his favourite aide-de-camp’.14 The emperor was lavish with wedding presents: a grand home and surrounding park, and for the bride ‘a dowry of 200,000 francs in shares in the Loing canal, diamonds to the value of 50,000 francs and trousseau costing 30,000 francs’.15 Bertrand and Fanny became accustomed to grandeur.

  It is small wonder that the Balcombes found the Countess Bertrand impressive. With memories of the luxuries of palace life behind her, Fanny and her husband now crowded into Napoleon’s tiny pavilion with the other visitors. Fanny had brought a gift with her: a miniature of the Empress Josephine, her second cousin. As Napoleon held the cameo portrait of his dead ex-wife, Betsy watched on, touched by the expression on his face: ‘He gazed at it with the greatest emotion for a considerable time without speaking. At last, he exclaimed it was the most perfect likeness he had ever seen of her, and told Madame Bertrand he would keep it, which he did, until his death.’16

  General Charles Tristan de Montholon was a decade younger than Bertrand, handsome but effete, elegant and particular concerning his dress. Although from an aristocratic family, he was a comte rather than the ‘marquis’ he claimed for himself. His military career was as fraudulent. His family connections had enabled him to be promoted, astonishingly to the rank of general, but with rarely an experience of gunfire. He claimed a heroic role in numerous battle actions, but a biographer observes: ‘None of these assertions can be corroborated either by official documents or even by a witness, while most of them are categorically denied.’ In 1814, he did not accompany Napoleon to Elba, but sided with the Bourbons and was accused of misappropriating funds intended as wages for his regiment.17 Count de Montholon has received some ferocious epithets from historians: ‘coward’, ‘malingerer’, ‘bounder’, ‘inveterate gambler’, ‘spendthrift’ and ‘cuckold’. The puzzle most frequently posed is why he was allowed to join Napoleon in exile in the first place. The usual answer is that it had something to do with his wife.

  Albine Hélène de Montholon was not in the first flush of youth: at the age of 35 she was three years older than her husband, but still attractive, with a heart-shaped face, dark eyes and fluttering lashes. However, she lacked the court manners and refinement of Madame Bertrand, and her décolletage may have been considered ill-advised for a morning visit in the country. The news had travelled around the island that Madame de Montholon had divorced two husbands already, and some speculated that—given the boredom of island life—she might sever from the third. She still grieved for her baby left in France, but was known to be pregnant again. Some whispered that Bonaparte was not averse to her charms and that she recognised advantage in encouraging him.

  The visitors had to leave by mid-afternoon to be back in Jamestown for the curfew. But Napoleon walked around the garden with Gourgaud, who wrote later in his journal that ‘we discussed women. He maintains that a young man should not run after them.’18 After they had all gone, Napoleon, according to Betsy’s Recollections, fell into a pensive mood, absorbed with the new miniature. He asked her to pass on his apologies to her mother: if Madame Balcombe ever found him staring at her, it was because she reminded him so much of Josephine.

  Writing her memoir thirty years later, Betsy sometimes invested her younger self with a suspiciously mature understanding and word-perfect memory. While a biographer has noted that ‘Napoleon, when deeply moved, always wished to confide his emotions to some patient female ear’,19 one cannot always credit the authenticity of conversations we are told he had with Betsy, such as the one concerning his former wife. ‘Anything she wore,’ he purportedly told her,
‘seemed elegant, she was grace personified. She never acted inelegantly during the whole time we lived together. She was the very best of women.’ As for the divorce, nothing would have induced him to do it, he said, except for political motives. He did it for the good of the French nation. No other reason could have persuaded him to separate from a wife whom he loved so tenderly. But he thanked God she had died in time to prevent her witnessing his last misfortune.20

  He seemed lost in thought, then asked Betsy whom she regarded as the most beautiful woman on the island. ‘I told him I thought Madame Bertrand superior, beyond all comparison to any one I had ever seen . . . Napoleon asked me if I did not consider Madame Montholon pretty. I said “No”. He then desired Marchand to bring down a snuff-box, on the lid of which was a miniature of Madame Montholon. It certainly was like her, and very beautiful. He told me it was what she had been, when young.’21

  Betsy was a Miranda on Prospero’s island, or even a sprightly Ariel, or else she was a court jester, a Shakespearean Fool, goading a tormented Lear across a blasted heath. She delighted in St Helena’s savage grandeur, and when Napoleon railed at its ugliness, calling it a hideous bare rock, she put up a passionate defence: ‘His natural prejudice against the island rendered him blind to the many beauties with which it abounded; he beheld all with a jaundiced eye.’22 He asked how she dared to contradict his opinion, laughed at her impudence and pinched her ear (an annoying habit of his). But he was happy to take long walks at this time, despite being followed by the English guard. Betsy would often accompany him on these rambles, sometimes with Jane and always shadowed by Captain Mackay.