Betsy and the Emperor

by Anne Whitehead

  Napoleon was unimpressed with the renovations to the sprawling and rackety farmhouse, still infested with rats. The only part he cared for was the new addition, an airy wooden reception hall with six windows and a small lattice-enclosed porch looking across to the Barn, dropping almost sheer to the ocean far below. His narrow bedroom on the ground floor adjoined a small study; an antechamber contained the one great improvement to his comfort: a deep lead-lined bath made for him by ship’s carpenters from the Northumberland (later replaced by an imported copper one), and filled from buckets heated over a fire outside.

  His male companions and their wives, children and servants arrived in a cavalcade of wagons loaded with baggage and were soon squabbling about the arrangements. Although the Bertrands had precedence when they were present, Gourgaud disputed Montholon for the position near the emperor at the dinner table.

  Madame Bertrand showed her usual independence of spirit by refusing the rooms offered; her family was lodged instead in a small cottage at Hutt’s Gate, about a mile distant. The Montholons were in two rooms opposite Bonaparte’s apartment, Las Cases in a former pantry near the kitchen, and his son in a cockloft above. The roof space over the old part of the house had been floored as sleeping accommodation for Cipriani, the valets Louis-Étienne Saint-Denis (known as ‘Ali’) and Marchand, and the Montholons’ maid Josephine; it was possible to stand upright only under the ridge beam and, in that intimate proximity, Josephine soon began an affair with Noverraz, the Swiss third footman. Rooms still had to be constructed for Dr O’Meara, General Gourgaud and the British orderly officer Captain Thomas Poppleton, who all had to make do with tents in the meantime and endure Longwood’s frequent downpours for over three months.

  Napoleon loathed the bare surrounds of Longwood. He was incensed to be told that he could walk and ride freely in an area only 12 miles in circumference, much of it cut by ravines and therefore unusable; beyond that limit he was to be accompanied by a British officer. A complex code of signals had been issued to every sentry post, tracking the prisoner’s daily movements, whether inside the house, in the garden or within the 12-mile cordon: ‘General Bonaparte is well; General Bonaparte is unwell; General Bonaparte is properly attended’, with a blue flag to indicate the dire circumstance that ‘General Bonaparte is missing’. O’Meara considered the restrictions extraordinarily rigorous, with a sentinel guarding every landing place on the island and every goat path leading to the sea.25 After 9 pm ‘the General’ was not at liberty to leave the house at all. Sentries were posted around the garden.

  Just before Christmas, the admiral received a terse letter, signed by Montholon, listing the emperor’s objections and demanding they be rectified. Cockburn responded in the same tone: ‘With regard to what is therein stated respecting an Emperor Napoleon, I have only to inform you that I have no cognizance of such a person. The very uncalled-for intemperance and indecency of the language which you have permitted yourself to use to me respecting my Government, I should not perhaps, Sir, condescend to notice, did I not think it right to inform you that I shall not in future consider it necessary to answer any letters which I may receive couched in a similar strain of unfounded invective.’26

  Also in December, Lieutenant-General Sir Hudson Lowe was preparing to depart London for St Helena as Bonaparte’s official custodian. Although it has rarely been acknowledged, he was peculiarly well qualified for that role.

  Lowe had been posted to Egypt early in his career. He had seen much action in Europe as attaché to Marshal Blücher; on the field at Bautzen in 1813 he had actually sighted Bonaparte. In the period before Waterloo he had been quartermaster-general to the Allied armies (British, Prussian, Belgian and Dutch) in the Low Countries, and was therefore in a position of considerable military influence in Europe—for commissariat, billeting and armaments—until the arrival of the Duke of Wellington. He had also commanded a regiment on Corsica that fought on Britain’s side against the French.27 When this latter qualification became known to Bonaparte, he expressed contempt for the commander of a bunch of mercenaries and turncoats.

  Unfortunately, Sir Hudson Lowe had a stiff conversational manner and little sense of humour and, at the time of his appointment, he was unmarried. A wife was always an asset for a governor on an isolated station. This latter deficiency was repaired on 30 December when he married Susan Johnson, the pretty and lively widow of a colonel with two adolescent daughters. She was well connected and was said to be ‘a very captivating woman’ with ‘a fine face, laughing eyes’.28

  Once his appointment became known, Lowe was lionised by London society figures, particularly by those aristocratic Whigs, led by Lord and Lady Holland, who professed admiration for Napoleon; they hoped to persuade the new governor to treat his prisoner with dignity and compassion and to permit them to send books and newspapers. Lowe was invited to dine at Holland House on eight separate occasions, meeting other ‘Napoleonists’ there, including Lord Byron and his wife Annabella. Byron took an immediate dislike to Lowe: he asked him whether Napoleon’s ‘dispositions were those of a great General’, and Lowe answered disparagingly that ‘they were very simple’. ‘I had always thought,’ Byron wrote to a friend, ‘that a degree of Simplicity was an element of Greatness.’

  Other distinguished people sought other favours. On 8 December, while still in London, Lowe received a letter under the House of Lords seal with a pressing request from Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod:

  My dear Sir

  I believe Sir G. Cockburn has written home to advise the Government to make an agreement with Mr Balcombe (my young Friend at St Helena) for the supply of Napoleon’s Table at a percentage. Will you be kind enough to ascertain this fact, and should it turn out there is such a recommendation, it may be brought to maturity before you leave us. In order that I may stand acquitted of any mistaken partiality for Mr Balcombe I enclose you a letter which I have lately received from Captain Browne [sic] of the Ulysses who brought home the last India Fleet, by which it will appear Mr B’s charges will fully justify my solicitude for his welfare.29

  Captain Samuel Brown, whom Tyrwhitt pointedly mentioned as endorsing the good opinion of his ‘young Friend’, was a greatly admired figure in the Royal Navy.30 Lowe promptly approved the recommendation that Balcombe become providore to Napoleon and his court and be granted a handsome percentage from the allocated annual budget of £8000.

  On New Year’s Day 1816, Napoleon gathered his companions together for breakfast in the garden. ‘A year ago,’ he told them, ‘I was at Elba.’31 The thought saddened him and he said they must live together as a family: ‘We are but a handful in one corner of the world, and all our consolation must be our regard for each other.’32

  If the companions were a family, Tolstoy would have recognised them as unhappy in their own way: fractious, jostling and competing for their father’s attention. They were suspicious of a new ‘family’ member who had arrived from England just three days earlier on the storeship Cormorant. Captain Charles Frédéric Piontkowski was a 30-year-old Polish officer who had been with Napoleon on Elba. After the defeat at Waterloo he had joined the devotees at Malmaison and on the flight to the port of Rochefort. He had sailed with them to England on HMS Bellerophon, but despite his pleas, he was not one of the designated companions chosen to join the Northumberland. Some of the group thought it suspicious that after three months the British had granted leave for Piontkowski, and only him, to join them. Piontkowski was given a tent in the courtyard and was appointed horse-equerry under Gourgaud. He found him a hard taskmaster.

  In order to oversee the catering, Balcombe was a regular visitor at Longwood. In mid-January, according to Gourgaud, he brought news: ‘Balcombe informs me that Prince Joseph Bonaparte has arrived in America. The Emperor, overhearing these words, stops his reading, remains in thought for a moment, then expresses his satisfaction.’33

  Soon afterwards, Balcombe brought his wife and daughters. They found Napoleon sitting on the steps
of the green-latticed porch, chatting with young Tristan de Montholon. When he saw them he came forward: ‘Running to my mother, he saluted her on each cheek. After which fashion he welcomed my sister; but, as usual with me, he seized me by the ear, and pinching it, exclaimed, “Ah! Mademoiselle Betsee, êtes-vous sage, eh eh?”—“Are you being good, eh?”’

  He took them on a tour of his ironically dubbed ‘palace’, leading them first to his bedroom, which she found small and cheerless. The walls were covered in fluted nankeen fabric and the only decorations she observed were the different portraits of his son and the Empress Marie Louise which she had seen before. ‘His bed was the little camp bedstead, with green silk hangings, on which he said he had slept when on the battlefields of Marengo and Austerlitz. The only thing approaching to magnificence in the furniture of this chamber, was a splendid silver wash-basin and ewer. The first object on which his eyes would rest on awaking, was a small bust of his son, which stood on the mantelpiece, facing his bed, and above which hung a portrait of Marie Louise. We then passed on, through an ante-room, to a small chamber, in which a bath had been put up for his use, and where he passed many hours of the day.’34

  They proceeded to the stone-flagged kitchen, where Napoleon asked Pierron the confectioner to create creams and bonbons for the girls; he then led them into the garden. Betsy found the view dismal and forbidding: the overhanging cliffs and the great hulk of the Barn, the iron-coloured rocks scattered with prickly pear and aloes. Madame Bertrand had told Mrs Balcombe that the emperor stared for hours at the clouds rolling across it, wreathing into fantastic shapes.35

  Life for Napoleon and his court at Longwood settled into a pattern. He rose late and soaked in a hot bath, revelling in this pleasure. His offer to Las Cases to enjoy a plunge was declined with ‘profound respect’. ‘Mon cher,’ Napoleon chided him, ‘in prison we must learn to help each other. After all I can’t make use of this contraption all day long, and a bath will do you as much good as it does me.’36 The count raised another subject: he wished to return Queen Hortense’s diamond necklace that he still wore in a velvet band under his clothes. ‘Napoleon asked, “Does it annoy you?” “No, Sire,” was my answer. “Keep it then,” said he.’37

  Dictation of the memoirs continued during the day, broken by a three-course lunch and a more elaborate dinner. After the informality of The Briars, meals were now observed with great pomp and ceremony and a nightly tussle for precedence, the men in full dress uniform, the ladies resplendent in jewels and décolleté gowns. The liveried servants stood at attention throughout the meal. No one sat until invited by their emperor.

  Fanny Bertrand sometimes found the dinners too tiresome. It demanded too great an effort to dress up, leave her children and walk or ride the mile to Longwood, particularly as Napoleon usually despatched his meal in twenty minutes, obliging his companions to stop eating when he did. However, he was annoyed when she and her husband absented themselves. ‘They did the same thing at Elba,’ he grumbled to Gourgaud. ‘They think only of themselves, forgetting what they owe me. They take my house for a hotel. Let them dine here always or not at all.’38

  After dinner there were games of chess and reversi [a strategy board game], or someone would read aloud from Racine, Molière or Voltaire. Madame de Montholon was often rebuked for nodding off. Intrigue, rivalry and jealousy simmered between members of the court, while their anger at the British often focused on the person of Sir George Cockburn, despite his efforts to make their lives more pleasant. As a New Year’s offering, the admiral presented Napoleon with a German-built barouche—a four-wheeled carriage purchased from the departing governor.39 He also returned the men’s fowling pieces, but they responded that there was ‘absolutely nothing to shoot upon the bleak rocks of Longwood’.40

  After some prevarication, Napoleon was persuaded to join an excursion with the admiral and his secretary John Glover. They rode through undulating green fields and wooded hills; the lushness of the countryside was a surprise compared to the island’s grim exterior. Their objective was Sandy Bay and one of the extraordinary sights of St Helena, the dramatic volcanic outcrop known as Lot, rising 1550 feet above the sea, with smaller jagged pinnacles—called Lot’s Wife and Daughters—thrusting up from a barren ridge. But Napoleon would have been far more interested in the fact that Sandy Bay itself was one of the few places other than Jamestown where a boat could conceivably be landed, despite the roiling surf.

  A few days afterwards, Napoleon entertained the admiral and several others to a formal dinner at Longwood. He managed to persuade Sir George that on walking and riding expeditions beyond the 12-mile boundary, Captain Poppleton, the English orderly officer, should follow on his horse 30 or 40 yards behind, instead of accompanying the party. Napoleon’s ability to charm and ensnare a person was at work, for he later informed his followers ‘that he could do what he liked with the Admiral’.41

  The next day he rode off with Bertrand and Gourgaud to test the limits. Bertrand rebuked Poppleton: ‘Captain, do you think that we are wanting to escape? You are almost on our backs! His Majesty desires that you should keep a greater distance.’ The young officer deferred to him and, as they descended into a steep valley, kept his horse a hundred paces to the rear. At the bottom of the defile the French were out of Poppleton’s sight. ‘Let us gallop,’ cried Napoleon. Suddenly he turned sharply to his left, and spurring his horse violently, urged him up the face of the precipice, making the large stones fly from under him and leaving the orderly officer aghast. The French took their mounts along a path observed during the Sandy Bay excursion, following the ridge above a valley which, a mile away, opened out to the sea and another possible, but still treacherous, landing place, Powell’s Bay.

  Captain Poppleton was in a state of panic, galloping wildly in every direction, but he baulked at the precipitous slope. In the end he gave up. At Deadwood Camp he ordered the flying of the blue flag, releasing the signal dreaded throughout the island: ‘General Bonaparte is missing’. Poppleton had to personally inform Cockburn of the catastrophe. He found him at lunch with Colonel Bingham and the Balcombe family at The Briars, as Betsy described: ‘He arrived breathless at our house, and, setting all ceremony aside, demanded to see Sir George, on business of the utmost importance. He was ushered at once into the dining room. The Admiral was in the act of discussing his soup, and listened with an imperturbable countenance to the agitated detail of the occurrence, with Captain Poppleton’s startling exclamation of “Oh! Sir, I have lost the emperor!”’

  Colonel Bingham was thrown into ‘a state of anxiety’, although the admiral said: ‘There’s no danger. Just a lesson for you.’42 He advised Poppleton to return to Longwood where he would most probably find Bonaparte. ‘This, as he prognosticated, was the case . . . he found the emperor seated at dinner, and was unmercifully quizzed by him for the want of nerve he displayed in not daring to ride after him . . . Napoleon often afterwards laughed at the consternation he had created.’43 It had indeed been a lesson. Under the watch of Sir Hudson Lowe, Poppleton would have been court-martialled.

  Henceforth the prisoner was obliged to have an officer in close attendance when outside the limits—with the result that he rejected the affront and would exercise only within the 12-mile boundary. For the next five years he stubbornly kept to this resolve. It was a decision that caused an inevitable decline in his health.

  The bickering and backbiting continued, and stored resentments festered among members of the Longwood household. Gourgaud and Las Cases objected to someone of such lowly rank as Captain Piontkowski dining with them, and the Pole was relegated to the back dining room shared by Dr O’Meara and Poppleton, the British orderly officer. ‘We still quarrelled,’ wrote Las Cases, ‘over the few remains of our life of luxury, and the relics of our ambitions.’44

  Gourgaud was recovering from an attack of dysentery, and O’Meara, who attended him, thought he had never seen ‘a man of the sword so excessively timorous’. Gourgaud’s excessive devotion
and endless carping were also wearying. Napoleon made a suggestion which was duly recorded: ‘The Emperor orders me to buy a pretty slave for myself. I reply that I intend to do so.’45

  Now that all the retinue lived within the Longwood boundary, Bonaparte’s utterances, his grievances, his disputes with Admiral Cockburn and later his great battle with Governor Lowe were comprehensively documented by his followers, each with their own personal bias. Along with the daily reports of the two orderly officers, the place became a virtual literary colony—one of those benevolent residential retreats where catering is provided and writers work in seclusion but gather together to exchange ideas over meals.

  There was of course the regular dictation of the emperor’s vainglorious account of his military campaigns (which would become the massive and unreliable work Mémorial de Sainte Hélène, edited by Las Cases, who became known as the ‘Boswell of St Helena’), but other French companions—General Bertrand, Count de Montholon and his wife Albine—were taking notes and storing up memories for future books to be published years later, as Cahiers de Sainte Hélène, Récits de la Captivité and Souvenirs respectively. Even the two valets, Marchand and Ali, recorded their exchanges with their master after leaving his presence, jotting down his confidences and bons mots for posterity.

  On 24 February, the Balcombe sisters made another visit to Longwood. Betsy reminded Napoleon that when he was at The Briars he had promised to join in a game of Blindman’s Buff but had not done so.46 When he recalled what the game was (he knew it in France as colin-maillard), a foolish blundering about with a handkerchief tied over one’s eyes, he tried to persuade her to choose something else, but then resigned himself to it.