by Mark Braude
Campbell described the
strange feeling that came over me when the aide-de-camp, after announcing my name, retired shutting the door, and I found myself suddenly closeted with that extraordinary man whose name had been for so many years the touchstone of my professional and national feelings and whose appearance had been presented to my imagination in every form that exaggeration and caricature could render impressive.
He had seen Napoleon once before. Surveying enemy lines at the battle of Bautzen the previous spring, he spied through his brass telescope a smallish man with a black two-pointed hat, hands clasped behind his back, striding back and forth, haranguing his troops. Now the emperor was close enough to smell. It turned out he smelled of heavy cologne and stale tobacco. “I saw before me a short active looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell,” wrote Campbell. “He was dressed in an old green uniform with gold epaulets, blue pantaloons, and red topboots, unshaven, uncombed, with the fallen particles of snuff scattered profusely upon his upper lip and breast.”
Long and lanky, Campbell towered over Napoleon. They spoke in French, with Napoleon rendering his name as “Combell.” He wanted to know at which battles he’d fought and what honors he’d received. Commenting on Campbell’s arm in a sling and the silk kerchief covering his scarred forehead and damaged eye, he asked how his wounds had been received. Campbell’s journal makes no mention of how he answered. Learning that Campbell was a Scot, Napoleon waxed rhapsodic about the epic works of Ossian, his favorite poet, which he praised as “very warlike.” He commended the military skills of the Duke of Wellington, under whose command Campbell had fought. Still holding on to the chance he might be sent to Britain, he likely hoped Campbell would report on his Anglophilia to Castlereagh, which Campbell did, quoting him verbatim. “Yours is the greatest of all nations,” Napoleon told him. “I esteem it more than any other.” Next he peppered him with questions about his specific orders concerning the exile and “expressed satisfaction at hearing that I was to accompany him to Elba, if he so desired, and to remain in the island so long as my services might be required.”
To Campbell he seemed a broken man, resigned to his fate. He spoke of living out whatever years were left to him in quiet retirement, “studying the arts and sciences,” surrounded by family. “I have been your greatest enemy—frankly such; but I am so no longer,” he said. “I have wished likewise to raise the French nation but my plans have not succeeded. It is all destiny.” By this point Napoleon had worked himself up to tears and closed their talk with a subservient bow, saying, “I am your subject. I depend entirely on you.” Campbell noted in his journal that his fifteen-minute interview with Napoleon was the longest of any of the commissioners.
Napoleon would have seen much in Campbell to flatter his view of the new social world of which he saw himself chief architect, wherein reward was meant to be based on merit rather than birth and careers were opened to talent, “or at any rate to energy, shrewdness, hard work and greed,” as one historian put it. Campbell’s making colonel before forty was perhaps not as great a feat as becoming a general at twenty-four or an emperor ten years later, but impressive nonetheless.
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IF, AS NAPOLEON CLAIMED, surviving his weakened dose of poison had renewed his resolve to live, many people still wanted him dead. Earlier in his life he must have felt invincible, as on Christmas Eve 1800, when he hailed a cheering audience at the Paris Opera just hours after a would-be assassin’s bomb hidden in a cart missed him but killed eight bystanders. Now he spoke openly and often of his impending murder, predicting that it would take place on Elba or on the way there. He gave away cherished objects—swords, guns, coins, books, and decorations—to favorite officers. He fixated on the threat of Barbary corsairs, pirates who sailed out of ports along the north coast of Africa, whose crews seized trading ships at will, marauding points along the Italian coast and its islands. It was said that either slavery or a gruesome death awaited any sailor caught by these profiteers. Over dinner one night at Fontainebleau “the subject of punishment by impaling, as practiced in the East, was mentioned,” recalled Campbell, which prompted a French officer to joke that those headed for Elba might soon get a chance to witness the practice firsthand.
The allies had granted Napoleon permission to establish a military presence sufficient to control his subjects and defend himself against attack. Four hundred veterans from his Old Guard were allowed to join him on Elba. The French also pledged to give him an “armed corvette,” meaning a warship with a single tier of guns, which was to be the main asset of a small naval force. He would have to pay for these defenses out of his savings of three million francs, at least until he could collect the two-million-franc pension that the French Provisional Government had promised to pay him, according to the Treaty of Fontainebleau.
He tried delaying his departure by issuing formal written complaints to Campbell about various small matters pertaining to his transportation. In this time of limbo, Countess Marie Walewska, known as “the Polish mistress,” his sometime lover, arrived at the castle. She never connected with Napoleon, either because word of her presence was kept from him or because he’d fallen too deeply into depression to bother. Later, he wrote to apologize for not having called for her, saying that if she found herself on the Tuscan coast he would greet the chance to see her, and telling her to think of him “with pleasure.”
He wrote to Marie Louise to tell her how the terms of his surrender would affect her. While most of their property would revert to the French state, she would be granted three small territories south of Milan, the duchies of Parma, Piacenza, and Guastalla, which had once been Habsburg holdings before being occupied by the French. While his dominion over Elba would end with his life, she would be able to pass down her duchies to their son. “This means 400,000 souls and an income of 3 or 4 millions,” he wrote. “You’ll have at least one mansion and a beautiful country to live in when you tire of my island of Elba and I begin to bore you, as I can but do when I am older and you still young.” He failed to mention that it had been Metternich, and not his own representative Caulaincourt, who had pushed for Marie Louise to have her own lands. He closed the letter with a promise to meet her in the town of Briare, about a hundred kilometers south of Fontainebleau, from where they could complete the trip to Elba as a family.
He sent a troop of cavalry to Orléans, where the most recent reports placed the empress, with orders to “liberate” her from the allies. But she was already on the move to Rambouillet, escorted by Austrian soldiers following Metternich’s command to have her brought to Vienna as quickly as possible. She was feverish and coughing blood. Emperor Francis wrote his son-in-law a terse letter informing him that Marie Louise would be returning home to regain her health, safe from harm and surrounded by family and friends.
Napoleon wrote again to his wife, telling her that while Francis had treated them very badly, “he’ll be a good, kind father to you and your son.” He added that he’d sent a copy of a document signed by Caulaincourt, “for ensuring a safe future to your son.” He closed by saying that “my misfortunes only affect me in so far as they grieve you. As long as you live you’ll be lavishing your affection on the most devoted of husbands. Give my son a kiss. Goodbye, my Louise. All my love.”
She never got the letter. Metternich’s band of spies was well versed in unsealing, transcribing, and then resealing private messages; when it came to the archduchess, Metternich often had Napoleon’s letters destroyed before she even learned of their existence.
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CAMPBELL WANDERED the castle corridors alone. One night a palace concierge offered to serve as guide. He pointed out the room where ten years earlier the empress Joséphine had begged her husband to spare the life of the duc d’Enghien, a Bourbon prince charged with plotting with the British to overthrow Napoleo
n and whose ruthless killing sent shock waves across Europe. Next, he showed him some upper-story apartments from where Pope Pius VII had recently been released, after being prisoner there ever since France had occupied the Papal States five years earlier.
Indicating the hallway by the royal bedchamber, the concierge spun the tale of Roustam Raza, Napoleon’s bodyguard, kidnapped as a young boy and sold into slavery in Cairo, where he was integrated into the martial caste of the Mamelukes after becoming the favorite boy of Sheikh El-Bekri, who presented him to Napoleon as a victory gift during the French invasion of Egypt. Roustam had guarded Napoleon ever since, sleeping on a mattress outside his bedroom wherever he traveled, a dagger at his side. He’d fled Fontainebleau a few nights before. The concierge told Roustam’s story as one of abandonment rather than escape, saying that Napoleon had arranged for him to join the exile with a substantial wage and had given him leave to go to Paris so Roustam could have his wife and children accompany him, after which he disappeared. Roustam later claimed that he fled Fontainebleau because he thought Napoleon would try again to kill himself and that he would be framed as the murderer if he succeeded.
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BY APRIL 20 the allied leaders had run out of patience and ordered Napoleon to quit Fontainebleau for good. At six in the morning, dressed in his worn royal uniform and two-pointed hat, he walked down the castle’s main staircase and into the Cour du Cheval Blanc, where he addressed some of the veterans of his Guard, telling them, “Do not lament my fate; if I have decided to go on living, it is to serve your glory. I wish to write the history of the great things we have done together!”
He kissed the eagle standard carried by one of his favorite generals, mounted his carriage, and shut the door. His entourage followed suit. The horsemen had been told to set the beasts off at a gallop for a dramatic exit. Trumpeters and drummers played the party off with an imperial salute that mixed with the sounds of shouts, most of them genuine, of “Long Live the Emperor!” Napoleon later said that when he left Fontainebleau he didn’t expect to ever return to France.
For the rest of his life, save for the brief interruption of the Hundred Days, other men would control where he went and when. Working together in an uneasy coalition, the allied sovereigns and their ministers forced Napoleon to feel something he’d avoided for half a lifetime: the sense of being someone to whom things happened.
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NAPOLEON IN RAGS
A DOZEN CAVALRYMEN RODE out from the gates of Fontainebleau, followed by a few carriages, Napoleon’s in no way decorated to distinguish it from the pack. Then came sixty cavalrymen and four more carriages, each hosting one of the allied commissioners. Eight berlins brought up the rear, carrying a physician, an apothecary, a secretary, a steward, two chief farriers, various valets, lackeys, and grooms, two assistant paymasters of the household, and the imperial paymaster Peyrusse, never out of sight of Napoleon’s chest carrying just under three million francs in gold and silver plate, which he’d spirited out of Paris a few days earlier. The young paymaster later said that he hadn’t followed the emperor into exile so much as his cashbox; yet it held only a fraction of Napoleon’s reputed two-hundred-million-franc fortune, which had been seized by the French Provisional Government.
Napoleon had once employed a staff of three thousand. On Elba the number would be just under forty. Those joining the exile knew they would be marked for having declared themselves for the deposed emperor and they risked losing their standing as citizens if they stayed beyond French borders for more than three years, as stipulated by the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Most of these followers were young and unmarried, but others left families behind. Whether or not they still felt loyalty to Napoleon, most of the highest-ranking officials under the empire had refused to join the exile. The devoted Caulaincourt, for instance, preferred retirement in the French countryside.
More than a few minor functionaries traveled to Elba thinking it could lead to unprecedented chances for advancement. If Napoleon remained there permanently, one could try to make oneself an indispensable part of his small staff, and if he somehow returned to power in France, those who had joined the exile would surely be rewarded for their loyalty. A twenty-four-year-old Corsican named Giovanni Natale Santini, who had been a courier at Fontainebleau at the time of the abdication, petitioned Grand Marshal Bertrand for a job on Elba but was told no room could be found for him in any of the carriages. He kept pestering until Bertrand told him he could sail with them so long as he made his own way down to the coast at his own expense and arrived in time to meet the ship that would carry them to Elba. He made no promise of a position. Santini scrounged up as much money as he could and headed south.
The two most senior French officials heading to Elba were men who had been relatively minor figures under the empire, General Antoine Drouot and Grand Marshal Henri Grand Marshal Bertrand, both just into their forties. By giving up the comforts of home they progressed from being two more members of the imperial entourage to forming the whole of Napoleon’s inner circle. Defeat had rooted out so many others who had once competed for the emperor’s attentions.
Neither man was particularly distinguished or especially brilliant, but they were both loyal, in their own ways. The third of twelve children born to a relatively poor baker and his wife in the northeastern town of Nancy, Drouot had risen to become the “sage” of the French army. He was a stern man with a prominent forehead and thin silver hair, renowned for a boldness on the battlefield proportional to his shyness and sobriety away from it. His colleagues said that nothing made him happier than poring over verses in the small Bible he carried everywhere. He looked forward to the exile as a time for quiet contemplation. Napoleon had offered him a gift of two hundred thousand francs as a reward for joining him on Elba, but Drouot refused, saying he didn’t want people to think he was following him for any other reason but love for his emperor.
Bertrand was the higher born and more handsome of the pair. Early in his career he’d been an engineer, and the pivoting bridges he designed for the famous battle of Wagram, which allowed troops and supplies to cross the Danube, were fêted as one of the era’s most brilliant feats of ingenuity. Fussy, stubborn, and prone to depression, he’d put his love of detail and etiquette to use while overseeing the daily operations of the most opulent court of the age, at least by French opinion, which was the only one that mattered. As grand marshal of the palace he was also charged with the security of the Bonaparte family, making him something between a majordomo and the head of the secret service. (Drouot had thought that he would be the one to be named to that position after the previous grand marshal was killed at the battle of Bautzen a year earlier.)
Napoleon had requested that the allies allow him to make the bulk of the journey through the Italian peninsula so he could sail to Elba from the port of Piombino. He may have wanted to rally Italian support for his eventual return, or it may be that he figured the Italians were less likely than the French to try assassinating him. But the allies ordered him to sail from the French port of Fréjus. Campbell suspected that Napoleon had only wanted to avoid that point of departure because he expected the portmaster there to cause a scene by denying his request to embark. To be insulted by a portmaster would have embarrassed any sovereign, but for one from Corsica, a society built on the twin bedrocks of pride and shame, the sting would have been especially strong. So Napoleon would take the straighter shot down through Provence to the coast.
The deeper this retinue traveled into the countryside, the fouler the mood and more violent the reception. Royalist and Catholic currents flowed stronger in the south than elsewhere in France, and conscriptions and taxation had hit the region particularly hard, while trade at the ports suffered under Napoleon’s embargoes. Southern royalists were also fired by the antirevolutionary rhetoric newly unleashed in pamphlets and papers. People with known republican sympathies were threatened with violent reprisal. “T
he countryside,” wrote a prefect for the Loire valley, “is in full revolt. Against whom? They don’t know, but to shoulder a gun is one way of expressing their thoughts.”
When the carriages passed through the town of Orange at three in the morning of April 24, villagers climbed onto them until being fought off by allied soldiers. Napoleon, terrified, remained hidden. Approaching Avignon a few hours later, he heard cries of “Down with Nicolas!,” a southern name for the devil, and his coachman was forced at saber-point to shout, “Long Live the King!” In the following town Napoleon saw himself swinging from a tree in effigy, smeared in butcher’s blood, a noose around the neck, from which hung a placard reading “Here, then, is the hateful tyrant! Sooner or later crime is punished!”
Napoleon continued the journey in disguise, wearing a tattered blue greatcoat and a simple round hat decorated with a Bourbon cockade. He borrowed a horse to ride ahead of the group posing as a courier, accompanied by another rider. When the rest of the procession caught up with him just south of Saint-Cannat, they found him in the back room of a run-down inn whose walls were draped in Bourbon white. The Prussian commissioner claimed the innkeeper, not recognizing the emperor, had asked Napoleon if he’d seen the “scoundrel Bonaparte” on the road and said she hoped he would be drowned on the way to his puny island. Napoleon begged off his food for fear of poison and drank only wine from his personal supply.