by Mark Braude
A few days later, deep into another dinnertime sermon, Napoleon told Campbell of an abandoned plan to invade Britain, which he could have done despite being outnumbered at sea because he would have outflanked the Royal Navy “by leading our fleet out to the West Indies, and suddenly returning.” He seemed to Campbell to be a total novice when it came to naval strategy; he had no idea of the kinds of risks involved in “movements upon a coast, nor of the difficulties occasioned by winds and tides, but judges of changes of position in the case of ships as he would with regard to troops upon land.”
Campbell also noticed that when Napoleon talked about “public affairs” he often lost his composure and talked “so openly as to leave no doubt of his expecting that circumstances may yet call him to the throne of France. . . . If opportunities for warfare on a great scale and for important objects do not present themselves, he’s likely to avail himself of any others in order to indulge this passion from mere recklessness. His thoughts seem to dwell perpetually on the operations of war.”
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THE EMPEROR IS DEAD
WHAT DOES AN EMPEROR do if he’s banished to a small island? Finds an even smaller island to conquer. Nine miles to Elba’s southwest lay an uninhabited, triangle-shaped rock known as Pianosa. The ancient Romans had once made it a bustling colony, but its size and relative distance from Elba made it difficult and dangerous to maintain over the centuries. By the time Napoleon arrived the Elbans had long since abandoned it, though they sometimes came over to run wild horses on its flat fields.
Napoleon sailed to Pianosa in late May with Campbell and a few soldiers to claim it as a possession. “All of Europe will say I’ve made a conquest already,” he told Campbell. They shared a picnic in the long grass, using a sail to shade themselves. Campbell noticed that Napoleon kept his hat on throughout the meal and sat far away, as though the moment might otherwise feel too intimate. Napoleon spoke of bringing settlers over to make the place farmable, with a small garrison to defend them. They would plant Black Forest acorns that would become towering oaks, he told Campbell, and there would be citrus orchards and vineyards as well.
Before returning to Elba they made a detour to another islet just east of Pianosa, whose lone peak housed some old cannons. Campbell wrote that Napoleon rushed to climb to its top but “after getting up half-way, although assisted occasionally both by the lieutenant of the Navy and myself, was obliged to desist. Indefatigable as he is, his corpulency prevents him from walking much and he’s obliged to take the arm of some person on rough roads.” On another occasion, a stocky Elban soldier, who had seen Napoleon hesitate before mounting his horse, had picked him up and put him in the saddle while he squirmed against his help. When the man was promoted to second lieutenant, Pons, who witnessed the scene, said it was so that no one could say the emperor’s body had been handled by a common foot soldier.
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BACK AT PORTOFERRAIO, Napoleon slept at the Mulini palace for the first time, occupying the central room on the ground floor. There were still large holes in the pink-white, dust-powdered plaster, the second story remained unfinished, and the garden was a mess. There were hardly enough linens, tableware, or furniture to host guests, since whatever household goods hadn’t been seized after’s Napoleon fall were still packed away in a chateau in Blois, where Marie Louise had deposited them after fleeing Paris.
One thing Napoleon didn’t need was a new bed. He liked to sleep on the small collapsible one he’d taken with him on campaign; it was simple and light and could be put together in five minutes, perfect for a soldier on the move. Weeks later, after his workmen had uncrated a larger and more comfortable frame, he still liked to pass some nights on the camp bed, entombed in a shroud of thick green curtains. “The Emperor is very happy here and seems to have forgotten that only a very short time ago he was in such a different position,” wrote Bertrand to Napoleon’s former secretary Baron Méneval, who was tending to Marie Louise. “He’s very busy getting his house in order, furnishing it and looking out for the site of a pretty country house.”
But Napoleon still felt unsettled. He’d yet to receive reliable intelligence on the whereabouts of the battalion of his Old Guard meant to be bound for Elba to form the core of his defense, and it was possible Louis XVIII or Talleyrand had persuaded the allies to renege on the pledge to let him have these soldiers, leaving him vulnerable to assassination by some third party who would do the job they couldn’t be seen to do themselves.
If and when the battalion of the Old Guard arrived, there would be horses and carriages needing housing. Bertrand handed some money to the man who oversaw most of Elba’s tuna trade and told him to vacate some warehouses near Portoferraio, which would become the imperial stables. They would eventually house nine carriages, eight baggage wagons, two post-chaises, two hunting carts, a landau, a cabriolet, and more than a hundred horses and mules, all tended to by a chief saddler, three assistant saddlers, a harness maker, a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, a head groom, a stud groom and his assistant, a coachman, eight postilions, ten stablemen, two troopers, two locksmiths, two carpenters, and a tailor to make the uniforms.
Commandeering warehouses for the use of horses was an especially excessive act on an island with few proper roads and whose narrow passages were so steep and winding they hardly fit a single rider. Campbell wrote that this showed “how little Napoleon permits reflection to check his desires.” Yet the Elbans seemed to love him. Campbell thought that any initial apprehension had faded after only a few days, which he attributed to the seductive power of royal spectacle:
The éclat given to him on landing by the salute of his Britannic Majesty’s frigate, and other marks of attention and protection which he’s evidently sought for all along on purpose to make an impression on the minds of the people, have contributed materially to the change of feeling.
Campbell also figured that the Elbans assumed their lives would only improve by their new association with Napoleon, even if he was no longer a real force and only there against his will. They had already seen Portoferraio teeming with ships offloading soldiers and diplomats; it was logical to expect a boost in trade as well. From his pulpit, the local vicar-general promised that wealth would pour into the island, and he called on his flock to pray for the man “who is more your father than your sovereign, and exult with holy joy in the bounty of the Lord who has marked you out for all eternity by this auspicious event.”
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LATE IN MAY, Captain Ussher sailed for Fréjus to pick up Napoleon’s sister Pauline, who was supposed to be there waiting. As they watched the departing Undaunted from the terrace of the Mulini, Campbell listened as Napoleon slipped into another nostalgic reverie. “Smiling, with an air of triumph,” he told Campbell that the Russian army had never truly recovered from the battle of Borodino, where he’d killed fifty thousand of their troops. Recalling former strength offered momentary relief from his present weakness. Though the Undaunted would soon return, Napoleon knew he couldn’t rely on its guns forever. The British navy, while the largest in the world, floated less than a thousand ships and each one had to be sent where it was most needed. The Undaunted was sure to be called away on some more important mission, eventually.
Shortly after the Undaunted sailed, a French frigate, Dryade, reached Portoferraio alongside an escorting corvette, the Inconstant, the same ship Napoleon had refused to sail on when leaving Fréjus a few weeks earlier. Montcabrié, the captain he’d insulted with that gesture, now brought orders to return to France with all of the troops who had originally been stationed on Elba under the governor’s control. This returning party would sail aboard the Dryade and the Inconstant would be left behind permanently for Napoleon’s use.
The allies had honored their pledge to furnish him with a ship, but to Napoleon the modest Inconstant fell well short of being the “armed corvette” specified by the tr
eaty, and he interpreted this bit of bait-and-switch as evidence of a plot to leave him open to attack while maintaining the appearance of protection. Yet while it only had a single deck and sixteen guns, the Inconstant had its merits. At three hundred tons it was fairly fast and maneuverable and could be quickly outfitted to sail should it ever need to leave port in a hurry. And it was large enough to carry a full battalion of troops, at least for a short crossing.
The same day the Dryade and Inconstant arrived also saw the Undaunted returned from the continent, but without the Princess Pauline. She’d already sailed from Fréjus a few days before Ussher reached the port, where he’d heard she was heading for Naples under the protection of the Neapolitan navy.
Ussher and Campbell climbed the 135 steps up from the main square to the Mulini. They found Napoleon playing chess with Bertrand. Campbell wrote that he sympathized with the “sulky” chamberlains watching the game and trying to stay awake, “interrupted from attending their private affairs or being with their families, for 1,200 livres a year.”
Ussher told Napoleon that the battalion of the Old Guard had safely reached the coast under British escort and that he was sure they would have pushed off in time to miss the gale that had recently pummeled the region. He added that in Fréjus he couldn’t convince anyone that he’d actually taken Napoleon to Elba, rather than to America, Gibraltar, Dover, or some other secret place. The papers had made much of his being conveyed into exile aboard a British ship, especially since people had seen the French corvette in port just prior to his sailing. The talk on the mainland, he said, was that the British “had seduced him.” Napoleon laughed and said, “What! Did they say I had now become an Englishman?” Ussher next reported that he’d seen on this recent trip back to France just how many supporters Napoleon still had there. Campbell wrote that Napoleon answered, “Oh! the Emperor is dead. I’m no longer anything.”
That evening Napoleon sat in the Mulini’s garden until sunset, scanning the waters in the hope of spotting the flotilla carrying his reinforcements. After dinner he invited Campbell and Ussher back out to the terrace to join him in his vigil, by which time the sky had gone purple-black and rainy. They took turns looking through Ussher’s night-glass, stubbier than a standard telescope, with a larger objective lens to make night viewing possible, while lacking the added glass to correct inverted images as an extra lens would block too much light. Meaning that when some faint shapes at the horizon line finally came into focus, just before midnight, they would have appeared to Napoleon as the lights of several ships floating upside down in the darkness.
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AND EVERY TUNA BOWS TO HIM
FIVE BRITISH SHIPS DOCKED at Portoferraio. They had sailed from Savona carrying eighty Polish lancers, eight Mameluke mercenaries, a ten-man military band, and another fourteen drummers. Most important, the ships carried guns, horses, and eight hundred elite veterans of the Old Guard who had volunteered to serve in exile. Though the battalion’s size doubled the four hundred soldiers allotted by the Treaty of Fontainebleau, allied officials had granted it free passage to Elba. Talleyrand had figured that if Napoleon could still persuade a few more zealots to sign up for the drudgery of defending his little island, so much the better for him; the loss of a few hundred men of poor judgment dealt no great blow to France.
Napoleon came down to see the boats putting in, the glint of bayonets and the sunlit water making the morning shine silver. It took some time for each ship to find its berth and for the men to be processed, so Napoleon wandered onto the Dryade, which was being loaded for its return to France. Technically this was an act of hostility against an opposing power, since the Dryade flew Bourbon white and Captain Montcabrié hadn’t invited Napoleon to board, but the crew greeted his breach of naval etiquette with boisterous cheers. Montcabrié wasn’t actually available to invite anybody on board, as he’d been ashore since the previous night under the impression he would be taken to the Mulini at any moment to pay court to the emperor.
Campbell watched how Napoleon made special effort to chat with the low-ranking men, often ignoring senior officers in the process. He heard how the shouts of “Long Live the Emperor!” from the Dryade sparked more shouts from soldiers waiting on the ships still to be unloaded, so that soon so many voices were bouncing off the hills that make Portoferraio a natural amphitheater that it sounded as though the whole town were cheering. In his journal he wondered if Napoleon’s impulsive dash up to the bridge of the Dryade had in fact been carefully planned, right down to keeping Montcabrié on land the night before, so that he would have a chance to “try the disposition of the [French] Navy, and to keep up a recollection of him in France.” Napoleon knew the value of public opinion and especially how mutable a force it could be; nothing, he once said, was “more unsteady, more vague” than this “mysterious, and invisible power,” adding that public opinion was also “truthful, just, and reasonable more often than one might think.”
The Dryade was only the first stop on his morning tour. He next boarded the Undaunted and thanked its crew for their ongoing service with a florid speech and the promise of another thousand bottles of wine. He presented Ussher a snuffbox decorated with his portrait set in diamonds. “Napoleon speaks most gratefully to everyone of the facilities which have been granted to him by the British government,” wrote Campbell in the day’s journal entry, “and to myself personally he constantly expresses the sense he entertains of the superior qualities which the British nation possesses over every other.”
Napoleon boarded another of the just-docked British ships and went down to the hold to see some of his old horses. He found Wagram, a gray Arabian, named for the battle in which he’d carried Napoleon so deftly, who whinnied and stamped on seeing his master, who gave him some sugar and a kiss, saying, “There you are, my cousin!” He visited with Montevideo, a huge bay, and Emin, chestnut and black, veterans of his Spanish campaign. Then with Gonsalvo, another bay, who had had his bridle split in two by an enemy ball while Napoleon rode him at Brienne, as well as the hot-tempered Roitelet, a French and English cross, who had gained Napoleon’s love ever since trying to throw him during a review in Vienna. He ended by seeing his two favorites: Intendant, a white Norman, used mostly for parades, and Tauris, a silvery Persian gifted by Tsar Alexander during a peace conference, who carried Napoleon for part of the retreat from Moscow until he was abandoned in favor of a sleigh.
Back up from the hold at quayside, Napoleon welcomed his men as they came down the gangplanks, sunburned and restless, and lauded the British sailors for having ferried their former enemies with such discipline and decorum. By late morning all the troops had disembarked, as had their commander, the redoubtable Pierre Cambronne, known as “protector of widows and orphans,” and terror of the barracks. He was prone to unleashing ferocious barbs on enemies and friends in equal measure, and the troops whispered that the reason he no longer partook of alcohol was that he’d killed one of his best friends in a drunken duel. His face was a map of crosshatched scars. In the last days before the surrender he had suffered blows to the head in three separate battles and the wounds had yet to heal by the time he reached Elba.
Cambronne and his troops pressed into the cramped Piazza d’Armi, sweating under their bearskin hats. Napoleon addressed them, urging them to live in harmony with the Elbans, who “also had French hearts.” Afterward, the soldiers regaled him with stories about their monthlong march to the coast, telling him how they had defiantly waved the tricolor in territory under allied control. While they were crossing the Alps, at Mont Cenis, heavy snow had forced them to shed some cannon, but they had refused to abandon his beloved chargers and so carried the horses along by hand, cosseted, through the icy pass. Cambronne told of the Austrian mayor who had tried denying them quarters until he said, “Very well, your men shall stand on one side and mine on the other, and we will see who the quarters will belong to,” which had quickly changed the mayor’s mind.
That afternoon Napoleon took one of his horses for a long ride inland, “to tire myself out,” as he told Campbell. By evening he was back to see that all the new arrivals were lodged within a mile radius of the Mulini. Infantrymen occupied the old San Francesco monastery and lancers, Fort Falcone, where they would be retrained as artillerymen since such a small island had no need for cavalry. The grognards, or old grumblers, as the grenadiers were lovingly known, went to Fort Stella, along with Cambronne, who moved into the apartment next to Drouot’s. Their windows looked out onto the emperor’s garden. Napoleon and his defenders now occupied the whole top third of Portoferraio.
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• • •
DROUOT TRIED TO BOLSTER the island’s forces by covertly recruiting troops from Corsica and the Italian peninsula, and he formed a battalion drawn from the existing Elban guard. The soldiers wore French uniforms adorned with the new Elban three-bee insignia. To complement the Inconstant, he requisitioned two lateen-sailed transport feluccas that had served the Rio mines, the Mouche and the Abeille, and converted them into patrol ships. He bought a six-gunned xebec, the Étoile, from a merchant in Livorno, and a small Maltese ship with a single gun, the Caroline, which was used for running mail between Elba and the mainland. Ussher helped out by gifting a ten-oared barge from the Undaunted for Napoleon’s personal use, duly baptized the Ussher. Despite his notoriously nasty attitude and undistinguished career, a sailor named Taillade was promoted to lieutenant and given command of this motley fleet. Pons claimed that Napoleon had only chosen the “insufferable” Taillade because he’d recently married an Elban woman and it was thought this promotion would please the locals. The ships were never properly outfitted, and their crews consisted mostly of career soldiers, poorly versed in maritime matters.