by Mark Braude
The family pierced the city center to the sounds of pealing bells and cannon shot. There were flowers and Bourbon flags. Underwood was struck by the quaint English bonnet worn by the stiff-backed duchesse d’Angoulême, the opposite of the oversized ones that were then fashionable in Paris. The crowds cheered, if somewhat mechanically, as Louis bowed, smiled, and put his hand to his breast in salute. His movements were stiff and forced. “There was but little demonstration of joy on the occasion,” wrote Underwood, “either on the part of the royal personages or on that of the people.”
Passing down the rue Saint Denis the marshals trailing Louis XVIII tried to rouse the crowds with cheers for the Bourbons. While some people joined in their hailing, others tried to shout them down with “Long Live the Guard!” and a few daring cries of “Long Live the Emperor!” There were still many men in the army, especially in the officer ranks, who felt a strong allegiance to Napoleon, though for now most of them were more interested in ending their fighting than anything else. To spare Louis the sight of foreign troops, his carriage was escorted by foot soldiers of the Parisian corps of the Imperial Guard, who did little to conceal their rage and humiliation. Chateaubriand described how they
brought their great busbies down over their eyes, as if to avoid seeing anything; others turned down the corners of their mouths in angry contempt; others again showed their teeth through their moustaches, like tigers. When they presented arms, it was with a furious movement, and the sound of those arms made one tremble.
Satirists were quick to skewer the monarch’s big moment. Parisians were soon passing from cloak to cloak copies of a crude engraving of a porcine Louis XVIII brought into the city on the back of a Cossack, whose overwhelmed horse wades through bodies of fallen guardsmen, burnt villages dotting the background. Another caricature showed a crazed-looking writer handing a dedicated copy of a thick and beautifully bound book to the beaming king; the tome is titled A History of the Nineteen Glorious Years of the Reign of Louis XVIII and all of its pages are blank.
A few hours later, at a crowded mass at Notre-Dame, Louis XVIII gained a deeper approval than he had when bouncing along the rue Saint Denis in Napoleon’s old carriage, as people now saw him up close and in a hallowed setting. He could play the role of stern and paternal monarch with skill. Shouts of “Long Live the King!” overpowered the roaring organ. Following the mass a giant balloon festooned with white flags was released into the skies above the cathedral. A few hundred meters away at the other end of the Île de la Cité, royalists put the last layers of paint on a plaster equestrian statue of the first Bourbon king, Henri IV, replacing the original that had stood by the Pont Neuf until it was toppled in the Revolution. The replacement statue bore the legend Ludovico reduce, Henricus redivius (By Louis’s return, Henri lives again).
While Napoleon was passing his final night aboard the Undaunted in the harbor of Portoferraio, Louis XVIII would spend his first at the Tuileries palace after nearly a quarter century away. Imperial bees still dotted the drapes, and the furnishings bore the mark of eagles and N’s. The new king slept in the former emperor’s bed. No one could say for certain how long his reign would last. As Napoleon himself had remarked several years earlier, “To be at the Tuileries is not all. We must stay here.”
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FOR TALLEYRAND, the Notre-Dame mass had been just one more in a long line of similar rituals. He’d watched over the coronation of Louis XVI decades earlier, just as he’d witnessed Napoleon’s ascension as Emperor of the French in 1804, and just as many years later he would be present to see Louis XVIII’s eventual successor installed on the throne. Not for nothing was he known as l’homme girouette, the weathervane man. An 1815 bestseller titled The Dictionary of Weathervanes, a kind of proto–Michelin Guide to political flip-flopping, would rank Talleyrand as the man who had changed his mind more than anyone else in France, for which he was awarded twelve weathervanes.
Now, by promoting a regime based on the idea of legitimacy, Talleyrand showed a keen understanding for what the French people wanted at that moment: another grand idea around which they could rally after the failure of Bonapartism. As Talleyrand had told the allied representatives just after the fall of Paris, Napoleon’s empire could only be replaced “by invoking a principle.” Nothing else but “a right hallowed by tradition . . . could vanquish one based on conquest and reinforced by glory.” The returned Bourbons offered not the wild dreams of the Revolution, nor a strongman on a horse, but an embodiment of the very history of France itself.
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PRETTY VALLEYS, TREES, FOREST, AND WATER
IN EXILE NAPOLEON COULD shape his days however he wished. He was free in a way he hadn’t been since adolescence, but that freedom seems to have terrified him. In his first week on Elba he issued a flurry of minor directives as though trying to ease his unquiet mind by busying it with procedure and protocol. As Bertrand later said of the first exile, Napoleon “dictated letters about fowls, ducks, meat and all eatables as if he was dealing at Paris with matters of the greatest importance.”
His first written order was a rambling letter to Drouot:
On Sunday hoist the new flag in every village and make a kind of holiday of it. . . . Call a meeting of the naval commissioner, the harbor master, the commander of the French ships in the harbor. We will make a count of how many ships there are and who owns each one. . . . Arrange for me to see anyone who can brief me about the civil administration, customs, taxes, sanitary matters and the management of the port. . . . Find a reliable man in town who can take charge of the stores and supplies. . . . By Sunday I want to know how many of the French garrison wish to stay with me. . . . It is urgent that the gendarmerie be efficiently organized. . . . See the sub-prefect about a store of grain that he says belongs to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. . . . Take it over as Crown property. . . . Make sure we have disbanded the coastal artillery companies. . . . They cost too much, and are useless anyway.
Next, in a three-page “constitution” dictated to Bertrand, he explained how Elba was to be organized. He named Drouot the new governor and head of military while Bertrand would handle matters of court, civilian issues, and Napoleon’s personal affairs. Peyrusse was treasurer. There would be a comptroller of the household and a master of ceremonies, a chief cook and a chief baker. A former veterinary surgeon of the imperial stables was promoted to court physician. Footmen, valets, grooms, bailiffs, and polishers were also named.
Positions were invented for as many Elbans as there were who needed flattering. Repeating his well-worn strategy of breeding loyalty by bestowing titles, Napoleon posted four influential Elbans to the newly created sinecure of imperial chamberlain. “I defy you to show me a republic, modern or ancient, that did without distinctions,” he once said. “You call them ‘baubles,’ but let me assure you that it is with baubles that men are led!”
Pons found the quartet somewhat lacking. The first man, Dr. Lapi, a former commander of the Elban guard, had a fine reputation but had “gotten by more on charm than talent.” The second, Vantini, chief prosecutor, had burned through his family’s fortune “by indulging in inexcusable excesses,” and made too much of his flimsy claims to noble lineage. The third, the blind Gualandi, mayor of Rio, was “less than nothing, and should never have crossed the Emperor’s door.” The final chamberlain was Portoferraio’s beloved if absentminded mayor, Traditi, about whom Pons could find nothing bad to say.
Along with a few landowners and magistrates these four men formed a Sovereign Council overseen by Drouot and Bertrand, giving Elba the appearance of a constitutional monarchy. But in reality, the daily running of the island fell almost exclusively to Bertrand and Drouot. Napoleon did manage to make use of an Elban judge he named to this council, Poggi di Talavo, who had a knack for drawing people out and hearing their stories, and became one of his main informers.
Bertrand arranged a ball for Napoleon to meet
some of these notables and their families. The evening started slowly. The women sat silent on wooden chairs while their men stood behind, everyone waiting for the emperor to appear. The guests had dressed elegantly, if inexpensively. “A hat of black straw, a white bodice, a short petticoat of red or blue, is the whole attire of the women,” Berneaud had written in his Elban travelogue. “A flower, ribbons, a huge ring, large ear-rings, a gold chain (of which the precious metal is lost in alloy): these are the objects of a female coquetry, which is not destitute of charms.” (Pons added in his own memoir that Elban women had “the most beautiful hair in the world.”) Late into the night Napoleon finally appeared, in full military regalia. He “went round the whole party, asking a question of each female after her name was announced—if unmarried, as to her father; if married, how many children she had,” wrote Campbell. “After this farce was played off he spoke to two or three of the gentlemen who were nearest him at the end of the room, and at last walked off, apparently impressed with the ridiculous nature of the scene.” Among the guests Campbell spotted three sisters he’d hired a day earlier to embroider his coat.
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DROUOT SETTLED into a spartan cell in the officers’ barracks by Fort Stella, not far from the Mulini palace, furnished with little more than a bed, a desk, a lamp, and a few straw-backed chairs. He welcomed this chance to contemplate, pray, and wait. He had no wife or children. Before leaving Fontainebleau he’d written to the incoming minister of war to say that while his personal attachment to Napoleon was taking him away from France, he would never cease “to wish for its happiness and its glory,” and that “regardless of the circumstances,” he was always ready to “file in alongside her defenders, ready to spill blood for her.” He closed by asking that the minister formally accept his allegiance to the new Bourbon government.
A few days after landing at Portoferraio, Drouot described his situation to a friend, a French general who had retained his position under the new regime:
I’ve been ordered to take provisional control of the island’s government, and I’ve only accepted on condition that I can leave this post after fifteen days, when the troops will have arrived from France. I’ve entirely renounced the great things of this world, and I want to devote the days of my exile to study. When I have the good fortune to return to my country it will be to enjoy a sweet and homey retirement, among family and friends.
In his letters, Drouot often said he was just about to leave his post so he could finally study full-time. “I’m still the governor of Elba,” he would write in early June. “I haven’t yet obtained my demission. I’ll insist again, and more forcefully once everything here is more organized.” He mentioned that he’d already found a few hours for study, which had given him “inexpressible pleasure.”
Drouot did have his pleasure-seeking side and briefly courted the Elban woman hired to tutor him in Italian, Henriette Vantini, who came from a respected island family. He was set to propose until a letter from his mother citing the complications of a marriage in such a “far off” country quashed the match. Napoleon was disappointed by the news. “You should get married here,” he told Drouot. “I want to keep you near me, I’m waiting to see you form a tie that will bind you permanently to the island.”
Bertrand was meanwhile taking over Napoleon’s apartments in the Biscotteria. The rooms would be large enough to accommodate his wife and children when they arrived, as well as a few servants. At Fontainebleau he’d told Napoleon he would follow him to the ends of the earth, but in the first weeks of April he and his wife had considered his quitting his service altogether. “I would love to believe the Revolution is finally over,” he’d written to his wife, Fanny, “and that the return of the Bourbons will restore calm and give our sad homeland the rest it so badly needs.” He told her he saw his service to Napoleon as separate from his identity as a Frenchman and that his true loyalty would always be to his family. Madame Bertrand, described by a contemporary as carrying herself like “a young queen,” hated having to trade the gilded lives they had made for themselves in Paris for an aimless existence in some Italian hinterland, where the educations of her children would suffer. She was pregnant with her fourth child.
In the end, Henri Bertrand was compelled to join the exile by a sense of duty and an equally strong sense of fear that if he abandoned Napoleon he would be doubly marked as a traitor to his past master and a threat to the new regime, and that his family might be left stateless as a result. Before he left Fontainebleau he sent a letter to a brother-in-law to be given to Louis XVIII. It contained his pledge to be as loyal a subject to the Bourbon king as he’d been to the emperor, and stated that he held no obligations or debts to Napoleon and was accompanying him freely of his own initiative. He wanted it known that he believed Napoleon when he claimed to have renounced all desire to return to France, and that while he couldn’t assure Louis XVIII about Napoleon’s state of mind one way or the other, he could promise that he himself would no longer become involved in “political affairs,” for he wasn’t a man “of revolution or intrigue.” He closed the letter by asking permission to visit his family in Châteauroux for a few months at some later date.
After a few days on Elba, Bertrand wrote to tell his wife that it was more pleasant than he’d thought it would be, even if he could only describe it in the most banal terms: “pretty valleys, trees, forest, and water.” No property on the island was anywhere near as brilliant as their family estate in France, but the houses were “passable.” He assured her that life would be easy and uneventful once she came to join him, since Napoleon could no longer claim any more right to the French throne than could Bertrand and so was no longer capable of “playing the adventurer.” They assumed Fanny would soon be traveling to Elba alongside Marie Louise, after which she would serve as the empress’s lady-in-waiting. Henri promised that once she reached Elba they would be free to travel at their leisure. “We’ll go see Naples, Genoa, and Livorno, Rome and Florence.”
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LESS THAN A WEEK after Napoleon’s landing, Portoferraio’s harbor welcomed an unexpected British ship, the Curacoa, which had sailed from Genoa. One of its officers presented Napoleon with a copy of the preliminary peace treaty that would soon be codified by the allies and the French Provisional Government. Napoleon read the document aloud with Bertrand, Drouot, Campbell, Ussher, and Koller in earshot. He returned it to the officer with a curt thank-you, as though he’d given up caring about such things.
The Curacoa was to leave the next day, carrying the Austrian commissioner, Koller, who felt he’d completed his duty in escorting Napoleon safely into exile and leaving Campbell as the last allied representative on Elba, as the Russian and Prussian commissioners had ended their missions at Fréjus. The ship would also carry one of Napoleon’s valets, bound for Milan to organize furnishing for the Mulini palace. Campbell asked Koller to make sure the valet was tailed after landing.
Just before the Curacoa sailed, Napoleon handed Koller a letter for Marie Louise and asked him to send back any word of his family’s whereabouts and health. “I’m having fairly nice quarters fitted up, with a garden and in very good air,” he wrote. “My health is perfect. The island is healthy, the inhabitants seem to be of a kindly disposition, and the countryside is fairly pleasant. All that’s missing is news of you and the reassurance that you’re well.” Napoleon gave Koller a final ribbing before he left, telling him that Austria had been foolish to join in a coalition against France that would only make Russia more powerful and threaten Austrian safety.
Campbell had also passed Koller a letter, a request to Castlereagh to extend his stay on Elba indefinitely. He wrote that he wanted to “obtain information of the intercourse which Napoleon or his agents hold on the opposite coast of Corsica” and added that the emperor himself had asked him several times to stay on as his personal guest. Campbell was transforming himself from a
mere military escort into a kind of spymaster.
Napoleon would have known that Campbell was reporting to Castlereagh about everything he heard and saw on Elba, but the arrangement evidently pleased him. Campbell’s presence was the closest thing he had to diplomatic recognition of his reign, and he understood that the threat of British naval power was the only thing that enforced his claim to sovereignty in the region.
The night the Curacoa sailed, Napoleon treated Campbell to a three-hour discourse on military matters. He dissected the methods the allies had used to defeat him and then explained how he should have outmaneuvered them. Campbell paid close attention. His summary of Napoleon’s talk took up seven pages of his journal:
His best information led him to believe that, instead of retreating to Langres . . . in the affair against the Prussians near Chateau Thierry . . . it was not for the sake of a crown that he had continued the war, but for the glory of his country. . . . Barricade all the streets with casks, and it would be impossible for the enemy to advance. . . . They took from 1500 to 2000 prisoners. . . . He knew all the workmen of Paris would fight for him. . . . That Marmont, a man who owed everything to him—who had been his aide-de-camp and attached everything to him for twenty-one years—should have betrayed him! . . . Three battalions of his Guards, in reserve against double their number. The instant these old soldiers showed themselves, the affair was decided.