by Mark Braude
He changed costume again, leaving Saint-Cannat in international mufti. An Austrian officer had given him his jacket while the Russian commissioner wrapped him in his cloak. Only at Aix-en-Provence did the procession pass in relative peace, as cautious officials shut the town gates while Napoleon wheeled by, keeping the ferocious crowds at bay.
Momentary relief came at the medieval Château de Bouillidou just west of Fréjus, where Napoleon reunited with his favorite sister, Pauline, the Borghese princess. They hadn’t seen each other in two years. “Paulette,” as he preferred to call her, teased him by saying she couldn’t embrace him until he removed his ridiculous coat, that “enemy uniform,” and then she kissed his hands and cried, all under the watch of allied officers. She promised to visit him on Elba, but compulsively seeking the cure to various mysterious ailments, said that she first had to take the waters on the island of Ischia. That night she gave her brother and the allied officers run of the chateau while she found quarters nearby.
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CAMPBELL HAD by then broken off from the group, riding alone to Marseille to arrange for an English frigate, Undaunted, to meet the party at Fréjus to serve as allied escort, protecting the French Inconstant from attack on the open sea. In Marseille he found Captain Thomas Ussher, a jocular Dubliner then acting as the town’s civil authority until the French Provisional Government established its control. Despite only recently being promoted to the command of the Undaunted, after having worked his way up the ranks of the Royal Navy that he’d served since age twelve, Ussher carried himself as a born gentleman and took pride in his gallantry. With the close of the war he was looking forward to retiring from military life.
Campbell presented him with a mission that sounded so bizarre he could hardly believe it. “It has fallen to my extraordinary lot to be the gaoler of the instrument of the misery that Europe has so long endured,” Ussher wrote to a friend in London. “It appears to me like a dream when I look back eighteen months and see all Europe prostrate at his feet—and he now absolutely my prisoner. It is a glorious finish to my services and leaves me nothing more to wish for.”
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WHEN NAPOLEON ARRIVED at Fréjus on the morning of April 27, Campbell, Ussher, and the crew of the Undaunted were already waiting. At the harbor Napoleon saw the rickety and humble French corvette Inconstant, which had already been stationed there, and which the allies had hoped would fulfill the terms of the treaty that promised him control of a ship for his protection on Elba. Napoleon told Inconstant’s captain, Montcabrié, that it was beneath his dignity to board a vessel of such poor quality, and the humiliated captain mounted his horse and rode off for Toulon. Campbell suggested that Napoleon and his staff should sail aboard the better-armed Undaunted, and the Inconstant could be sent to Elba a little later and would then be left there for his use. The arrangement satisfied Napoleon, and that night at dinner he was all charm.
The Undaunted was loaded to sail that evening, but Napoleon tried again to delay, holding out for some miraculous change of events that could keep him on the continent. He presented Campbell with a formal letter declaring that he now refused to board the British ship unless its crew hailed him with a twenty-one-gun salute. Though it wasn’t customary to give such a greeting when boarding a vessel in the evening, Campbell yielded to Napoleon’s request, seeing it for the silly gambit it was. While no last-minute change of fortune arrived to keep him from sailing, Napoleon had at least scored a symbolic victory against the allies, a small victory, but not one to be dismissed in an era when political power and the minute details of etiquette and display were so closely tied.
Lack of wind still kept the ship in port for a few more hours. This was a lucky chance for the eager courier Santini, who reached Fréjus just in time to find Bertrand and secure a place on board. The delay also allowed Captain Ussher some time up close with Napoleon. They dined together at an inn near the docks. Napoleon had by then dashed off another letter to Marie Louise. “My health is good, the weather is fine and I shall have a smooth passage,” he wrote. Bertrand meanwhile wrote to his own wife, Fanny, telling her that they had had “happy travels” down from Fontainebleau, aside from a few minor “insults” at some villages they had passed.
The last time Napoleon had sailed the Mediterranean from the south of France was as the ascendant commander in chief of the French Army of the Orient, sixteen years earlier, nearly to the day. An armada of fifty-five warships and more than a hundred transport vessels had left for Egypt and the promise of glory, with General Bonaparte aboard the flagship, the three-decked, 118-gun Orient, at the time the largest vessel of any navy in the world. Under his command were more than fifty thousand men, including leading “savants” of France—engineers, naturalists, artists, astronomers, and other scholars charged with studying (and looting) the wonders of Egypt, many of which were eventually housed alongside his other pillaged war trophies at the Musée Napoléon in the Louvre.
He would now be sailing from the same jetty where he’d docked on returning from that grand, failed campaign. The small inn near the docks where he enjoyed his first meal on French soil after the time abroad was the same inn where he dined with Captain Ussher. Absence had been his ally then, as talk of his Oriental adventure spread across Europe, helped largely by Napoleon’s own growing propaganda machine.
As he ate with Ussher, a crowd gathered outside. “His sword was on the table and he appeared very thoughtful,” wrote Ussher. “There was a very great noise in the street and I said to him, ‘The French mob are the worst I have seen.’ He answered, ‘They are a fickle people.’ He appeared in deep thought, but, recovering himself, rang the bell and, ordering the Grand Marshal to be sent for, asked if all was ready. Being answered in the affirmative he turned to me and said in his usual quick way, ‘Allons.’”
They boarded the Undaunted at eight to wait for favorable winds. It so happened that a fourth lieutenant Smith, nephew of the British admiral Sir Sidney Smith, one of Napoleon’s chief naval foes during the Egyptian campaign and beyond, was the man to take him out to the Undaunted in a shore boat. The young Smith had just been freed from seven years as a French prisoner. Ussher introduced him to Napoleon, mentioning his lineage and the details of his captivity, and thought for a moment that Napoleon felt “his conscience prick him.” But Napoleon only muttered, “Nephew to Sir Sidney Smith. I met him in Egypt.”
Twenty-one guns saluted Napoleon as he boarded. Ussher described “bugles sounding, drums beating, horses neighing, and people of every nation in Europe witnessing the embarkation of this man who had caused so much misery to them all.” The Undaunted left the harbor at midnight, brightened by a large moon.
{ 4 }
THIS NEW COUNTRY
FROM HIS LEAKING CABIN, Paymaster Peyrusse wrote to his father about being rocked so violently by the waves that he fell out of bed and smacked his head on the wet floor. The sounds of overnight hammering had him convinced the ship wouldn’t survive the crossing. When he voiced his concerns about the rough weather to some midshipmen on watch, they laughed and told him winds ten times stronger could hardly be called a storm by their reckoning. He spent the rest of the trip sulking in his cabin, trying to soothe his seasickness with ham, tea, and sweet Málaga wine.
Napoleon enjoyed a more comfortable night than did his paymaster. Ussher had given him the run of the captain’s quarters, which spanned the Undaunted’s stern, while he shared a smaller night cabin with Bertrand and Drouot, the Frenchmen’s beds separated from his own by a flimsy screen.
Out on the bridge the next morning with a cup of black coffee in hand, Napoleon said that he’d never slept so soundly and that he felt in excellent health. The ailments from which he was silently suffering (gallstones, hemorrhoids, urinary infections, stomach cramps, and swollen legs—not an unusual list for that era) would have been exacerbated by the sea journey, and Napoleon
wasn’t a great sailor, yet the farther south he traveled, the happier he seemed to be. Campbell overheard some French officers saying they had never seen the emperor looking so relaxed.
Away from France on a thirty-eight-gun ship he no doubt felt safer than he had in months, even if his current protectors had until very recently been among his fiercest enemies. And so long as the Undaunted sailed, he still occupied the unsteady space between departure and arrival, where the past felt not quite real and somehow reversible and the future could still be shaped to suit his needs.
The Undaunted passed within “a cannon’s shot” (Peyrusse’s words) of the northern tip of Corsica on May 1. Peaceful salutes were exchanged with a squadron patrolling the coast, which cheered the passengers, still unsure if anyone in the region knew whom their ship carried or how they might react to that information. Perhaps prompted by seeing the island, Napoleon sought out the young Corsican messenger, Santini, and asked about his family history and career ambitions. He assured him that Bertrand would find a place for him on his staff once they were all settled. When Santini started to cry, Napoleon wandered off to some other part of the ship.
Accustomed to commandeering any ship in his sight, Napoleon demanded that the captain of a passing brig be brought aboard to give news from Corsica, but Ussher, laughing, denied the request. In his letter to London, Ussher gloated about these kinds of intimacies with the emperor. As they had sighted the Alps from the bridge, he wrote, Napoleon “leaned on my arm for half an hour, looking earnestly at them” and then smiled at Ussher’s remark that he’d “once passed them with better fortune.”
A few months earlier the captain had cut out a newspaper rendering of Napoleon and pinned it to a wall above his table so he could advise guests aboard the Undaunted to study the image and commit it to memory. The word back then had been that Napoleon would try to escape across the Atlantic rather than surrender. The Royal Navy might require their help to spot this enemy in disguise, Ussher would tell his dining companions.
Now he shared the same table with the man from the picture, whose likeness he would have seen in so many different forms: in pen, oil, clay, silver, stone, wax. With the relative freedom of the British press, he might have seen Napoleon as the snub-nosed imp who pestered John Bull in inky caricatures, or as Gulliver, helpless in the palm of a Brobdingnagian King George III. Perhaps he’d seen some version of Jacques-Louis David’s famed painting of the general as a modern Hannibal astride an enormous charger subduing the windswept Alps, or of Ingres’s severe, laurel-wreathed emperor, all ermine and purple velvet. His face would have come to Ussher head-on, at three-quarters, and in profile (the subject increasingly preferring this last angle as his features softened with the years), with the penetrating blue-gray eyes never meeting the viewer as an equal but always looking off to some luminous future he alone could see. “He laughed at the idea of our being caricatured, and said ‘the English had a great passion for caricaturing,’” wrote Ussher, who answered that “John Bull caricatured and abused people when they deserved it” and joked that he himself would likely be victim to this same treatment and that someone would probably draw him nursing Napoleon’s son.
Only natural, then, that when describing the real man, the best Ussher could do was compare him to a representation. “The portrait of him with the cockaded hat and folded arms is the strongest likeness I have seen,” he wrote to his friend, adding that Napoleon’s pudginess suited him finely, saying that “he looks uncommonly well and young and is much changed for the better, being now very stout.” In the letter’s postscript Ussher wrote that “someone said I was like Bonaparte, but not so well looking. It was a Frenchman and he thought even with that amendment that he paid me a great compliment.”
As they sailed near the west coast of Corsica a storm front moved in and it looked as though they would be waylaid overnight. Napoleon asked if they could be anchored at the harbor town of Ajaccio, his birthplace. He and the rest of clan Bonaparte had been expelled from the island in 1793, branded as traitors for sympathizing with the nascent French Republic above championing Corsican independence, though Napoleon had initially hoped the two causes could be compatible. He hadn’t visited his birthplace since an unpleasant five-day layover during the journey back from Egypt, waiting for winds to carry his ship home to France, and to the end of his life no epithet apparently riled him so much as being called “the Corsican.” Ussher felt that the poor weather made an anchorage too dangerous, but as a sop Campbell told Napoleon he could write letters to friends on the island and he would make sure they were delivered. Instead, Campbell had the letters sent to Corsica’s commanding officer with orders they be opened and destroyed.
Before sunset, a passing tartane instigated contact with the Undaunted and Campbell and Ussher allowed its Corsican shipmaster to come on deck, seeing it as a way to pass the time. The sailor spoke of how eagerly his fellow islanders had declared themselves for the restored Bourbons and, unaware that Napoleon numbered among his listeners, praised the new state of affairs somewhat too enthusiastically for the emperor, whose loud sigh caused the shipmaster to observe him more carefully. He continued his report, now even more bold in his support for the Bourbons and throwing in a few choice oaths for emphasis. Napoleon walked away while he was midsentence and asked Ussher to tell the man to return to his ship.
The skies cleared the next morning and the Undaunted sailed on, eastbound. Campbell passed his thirty-eighth birthday. His diary makes no mention as to whether the anniversary was celebrated. Napoleon spent much of the day reading. He’d taken nearly two hundred works from among the thousands of books at the Fontainebleau libraries. Among them was a travelogue he’d spotted just before leaving, Thiébaut de Berneaud’s Voyage to the Isle of Elba. Berneaud advised that on approaching Elba one should expect to see nothing more than a few “roads rugged and uneven, cottages deserted. Ruins scattered over the face of the country, wretched hamlets, two mean villages, and one fortress.” Napoleon would have read that “the mountains of the Isle of Elba . . . together present only a mass of arid hills which fatigue the sense, and impart to the soul sensations of sorrow.”
Despite the descriptions of supposedly barren landscapes, Berneaud’s book was an odd sort of love letter to Elba. He was one in a long line of writers who believed they had discovered something enviable in an island people somehow spared from the miasma of civilization. The Elbans, he wrote, were “endowed with a certain sprightliness of imagination that renders them capable of receiving the strongest impressions; thence proceeds their excessive predilection for extravagant and romantic tales. . . . They are unacquainted with the monstrous luxury of cities.” Berneaud claimed that these islanders possessed a “vital current . . . of pure quality. The old men are not decrepit. I have known many of them who had reached their ninety-fifth year without experiencing the slightest ailment.” They had none of “the cunning, the laziness, or the listlessness so natural to a southern people,” and though Elban women were “not in general beautiful,” there were “pretty girls in the western mountains and at Rio [a mining town on the east coast]. They press their swelling bosoms under enormous busks laced tight with ribbons.”
Though the Elbans seemed insular and primitive to outsiders, they looked out on the world with a broader perspective than that of most mainlanders. Seafaring people had their minds opened by always being on the move, fishing, sailing, and trading. They were among the globe’s most cosmopolitan souls, forced by geography and economic necessity to regularly do business with strangers. Being such rich economic prizes, capable of sparking wars among powers thousands of miles away, islands were forever being conquered, colonized, and traded, leading to polyglot populations. Elba had its share of outdated customs, parochial thinking, and isolated villages, but many of its men and women, especially in its capital, Portoferraio (the “Port of Iron”), on the island’s northern end, would have met daily with travelers from afar.
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UNKNOWN TO ANYONE on the Undaunted was that reports of the allied victory had thrown Elba into open revolt. A British naval blockade had kept the island cut off from the continent since December and starvation loomed. Troops remained under the nominal charge of the French governor, Dalesme, but just barely. He’d once controlled a force of five thousand men drawn from France, Corsica, and the Italian peninsula, but by early 1814 so many soldiers had deserted that Dalesme was left with only five hundred Frenchmen garrisoned at Portoferraio.
West of Portoferraio, in Marciana, the townsfolk flew crude versions of the Union Jack and had tried unsuccessfully to get the captain of a passing British ship to land and take control. They burned Napoleon in effigy, singing and dancing around the flames. To the south in Porto Longone (present-day Porto Azzurro), a mutiny that started with villagers tearing tricolor flags had escalated to their shooting the French commanding officer and hacking his body to pieces. Porto Longone had been Dalesme’s key southern stronghold, with its imposing hillside citadel, a remnant of Spanish occupation centuries earlier. Farther along the coast some villagers openly declared allegiance to Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, while a few hard-liners around the island saw this as the time to throw off the rule of all masters forever and urged a total revolution. The French commander in the rural northern and eastern regions beyond Portoferraio managed to quell some of the uprisings but only through the most brutal means.
Still, it was a celebratory time on the island. On the first day of May, following a centuries-old tradition, unmarried men wandered the villages to sing serenatas in praise of springtime love and the charms of the local maidens, who rewarded them with little corollo cakes as syrupy as the lyrics being sung. No one wanted to abandon a tradition that had led to so many marriages, and so the sounds of protests and politics were made to compete with poetry and guitars.