The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  Pauline had been Napoleon’s coconspirator and source of comfort since childhood. She shared in his earliest military triumphs in Italy, around the same time she married her first husband, one of Napoleon’s officers, following his advice. She’d gone out of her way to make her former friend Joséphine feel unwelcome in her own home after Napoleon decided to divorce her, hosting dinner parties at Fontainebleau without inviting the chatelaine herself. When Napoleon hid himself away for a week at the Grand Trianon at Versailles after the divorce, Pauline was installed nearby at the Petit Trianon.

  Following the abdication, Pauline had written to tell her mother that they should both get to Elba as soon as possible. “He seems to want [you to come] very much and he told me to tell you that,” she wrote. The Bonapartes had all been granted passports and free passage to Elba. Joseph, Louis, and Jérôme Bonaparte were then in Switzerland, and Lucien was in Rome. But Pauline would be the only one to make use of the privilege, while the others made their excuses. She complained of such behavior to her mother. “One mustn’t leave the Emperor all alone. It’s now when he’s so unhappy that one must show him affection.”

  Possessed of the same quicksilver energy as her brother, she left Elba after only a single full day on the island, heading for Naples. She couldn’t even be persuaded to stay for the celebration of George III’s birthday that officers of the two British ships still moored at Portoferraio had planned for June 4, a curious decision for someone as fond of sailors as she was of parties. When Campbell asked about his sister’s quick leavetaking, Napoleon told him Pauline had only happened to be in the area because of existing plans to visit their other sister, Caroline, in Naples. Her visit to Portoferraio was only meant as a quick stopover on the way, he said, though he was sure she would return soon.

  Campbell suspected that Pauline had come carrying correspondence from family and friends, and that she might also be carrying letters to Naples from Napoleon. Their brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, knowing he couldn’t hold on to his kingdom without allied support, had put on a good show of breaking ties with Napoleon and had halted all customary shipments of cattle and wheat to Elba. But Campbell recognized that Murat and Napoleon could easily be in covert contact and that Pauline might be their intermediary.

  * * *

  • • •

  ON JUNE 4 THE CREWS of the Curacoa and Swallow invited Napoleon, his generals, and a few Elbans aboard to celebrate their king’s seventy-sixth birthday. It was a tricky thing to pull off. Mindful of not upsetting anybody in port, the British officers flew the Royal Standard at mainmast, the Bourbon white at foremast, and the new Elban flag at mizzenmast. The crew of the Dryade returned the favor by flying the blue, red, and gold of the Royal Standard, and the magnanimous spirit spread to the crew of the Inconstant, which was soon flying British colors as well.

  Napoleon arrived late in the proceedings, accompanied by Bertrand, Drouot, and Cambronne. Apart from lifting his hat to the captains of the British ships, he made no ceremony of his entrance and spent much of the hour he attended the party off on his own, inspecting different parts of the boats. Before dinner he sought out Pons, who had shied away from making the first contact since they were still the middle of what Pons called their “great quarrel,” prompted by his speech at the San Cristino feast. Pons presented his wife, and Napoleon praised her as an ideal mother, so singularly devoted to her “saintly duties” of childrearing. He chatted with the couple’s young daughter, tickled by the fact that she had no idea who he was and spoke to him as she might to a bootblack.

  Napoleon signaled to Pons that they should talk privately and asked if it was true that he objected to the party and had considered boycotting it. Pons answered yes, he thought it in poor taste to celebrate a foreign ruler in the backyard of the sovereign he’d just defeated. Napoleon countered that for now the British sailors were part of Elba’s community, making this a “family gathering,” and that they should respect any enlisted man’s duty to celebrate his king’s birthday regardless of where he happened to be stationed. But he allowed that maybe Pons was right in being wary of the British, and that the night might just have been Campbell’s way of taunting him. He told Pons they must never forget that Campbell was not their friend but the representative of a government with “evil intentions” and that whatever his surface actions might be, his duty was to do harm. The British would never forgive him, Napoleon went on, for having challenged their supposed supremacy, and they still dreaded his influence, which was why they wouldn’t let him be exiled in England.

  It was the first time Napoleon had spoken so openly to Pons and the latter was eager to keep talking, but Napoleon said he felt rude keeping everybody waiting to start the meal. The menu’s highlight was roast chicken, served on a dining table stretching the entire length of the Swallow. Some flags and sails had been arranged to section off the quarterdeck as a makeshift ballroom, a lone chair up on a platform at the edge of the dance floor reserved for the emperor. Pons wrote that the rest of the evening was uneventful aside from some drunken dancing and the “improprieties” of a few British officers, which scandalized some of the local women.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FRENCH SHIP DRYADE was set to sail back to the mainland the next day, carrying any citizens from the original detachment of soldiers who wished to be repatriated. The former governor Dalesme understood that he no longer had a place on Elba and decided to return to France. Napoleon assured him he would have kept him on as commander of the army if it weren’t for the arrival of the more senior Cambronne, and promised that if he couldn’t find suitable work with the French government he would see him placed into Marie Louise’s service. Dalesme, touched by the gesture, told Pons that he would gladly “be killed a hundred times” for Napoleon. Watching him board the Dryade, wrote Pons, “one would think he was the one going into exile.” By contrast, Dalesme’s second in command, Colonel Vincent, was less sentimental about his exit. He told Pons that Napoleon could hardly disguise how little he cared about their departure and that anyone stupid enough to stay on that wretched island just so they could serve so callow a man was in for a “hard time.”

  That afternoon a court herald caught Napoleon on the terrace of the Mulini following the Dryade with his eyes as it sailed north. Once the ship was beyond the view of the naked eye he didn’t bother to watch it through his spyglass but only gave it a little salute with his hand before going back inside to bark orders for his carriages, his horses, and his rowboat. He went off on another aimless ride.

  That night there was a fine meal, the palace lit blue and gold by another setting sun. After dinner Napoleon paid his courtesies to his guests and retired to his room. The court herald whispered to Pons that he pitied the emperor, who seemed to think they couldn’t all see him “suffering through his smile.”

  SUMMER

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  THE MORE UNFAVORABLY DOES HE APPEAR

  THE SUMMER STARTED WITH a series of small crises. The first had roots dating back to before Napoleon’s arrival. Months earlier a privateer had seized a British merchant ship sailing from Malta and brought it into Portoferraio to wait out the wartime blockade. After taking control of Elba, Napoleon had exercised his sovereign rights to claim the seized ship, and its cargo was kept under armed guard. Now Board of Health inspectors were calling for the ship to be brought to Livorno, where it would undergo the standard quarantine. Livorno served as the region’s main lazaretto, where people and cargo sailing from ports prone to plague could be purified before being cleared to trade at other ports. But Napoleon refused to send the ship to Livorno, so the inspectors retaliated by putting Elba under a twenty-five-day quarantine enforced by all surrounding ports.

  Napoleon was certain this protest would end quickly, and in any case, as he told Campbell, Portoferraio would eventually replace Livorno as the main lazaretto, now that it was under his control. He boasted that he would also make it the
region’s key port of trade as well, and said that the jealous health officials had only attempted this bit of “commercial intrigue” to punish him for wanting to establish Portoferraio’s primacy. Campbell failed to make sense of Napoleon’s rejection of “long-established practice although it cuts off his communication with every other part of the world except by clandestine means, to his own loss and inconvenience as well as that of every other person in this island.”

  At Napoleon’s request he sailed to Livorno to play peacemaker. The quarantine restrictions kept him from landing, so he met with the health officials on his own ship. They confirmed Campbell’s suspicions that they actually had no interest in punishing Napoleon, nor did they want to be cut off from trade with Elba. They saw no threat of Livorno’s ever being surpassed, since its economy was so much stronger and its harbor was far busier and better located than that of Portoferraio. They explained that they were only following protocol and trying to avoid an outbreak of plague. They warned Campbell that the “mercantile world” wouldn’t put up with Napoleon’s selfishness, and by working in tandem they could easily starve out Elba, which was so dependent on foreign grain and other imported staples.

  Campbell relayed all of this to Napoleon, and within days he quietly dropped his grandiose plans for Portoferraio’s harbor. The health inspectors lifted their quarantine, the seas reopened, and although the bounty of the seized ship remained in Napoleon’s possession, the little lazaretto war was over. It’s possible Napoleon orchestrated the dispute to momentarily stop ships from coming in and out of Elba while creating an excuse to get Campbell away from the island, either as a test run for an eventual escape or because he planned an actual escape before losing his resolve. But there’s no evidence he was seriously contemplating leaving Elba at that early stage of the exile.

  The second crisis involved the miners of Rio and started when Napoleon asked Pons to assign his workers to clearing some of the island’s roads, telling him that they should tackle this work after finishing their days at the mines. Pons refused. Such a workload would only exhaust people to the point where neither mining nor roadwork could be done effectively. But word of Napoleon’s unreasonable request reached the miners nonetheless, and they took it as an insult. Morale was already low in Rio, where miners were on course to produce far less in the second half of 1814 than they had in the same period over the past two years. The town teetered toward outright rebellion after its mayor, looking to ingratiate himself with Napoleon, suggested that some rotten flour stored at Portoferraio, which the soldiers refused to eat, could be mixed with unspoiled flour to make bread for the miners. Napoleon liked the idea, which resulted in a few hundred miners sick with food poisoning.

  The worst of the summer crises stemmed from the fact that taxes hadn’t been levied on Elba for nearly a year because of the war. Drouot sent criers from village to village to announce that all back taxes were now owed to Napoleon and that anyone failing to pay by July 1 would face heavy consequences. The island’s contributions to the French treasury had always been steady if meager, amounting to about thirty times less than what other departments might pay, and French tax officials had never encountered resistance from the Elbans. But the islanders had never had to come up with such a large payment in so little time.

  To Campbell this was another of Napoleon’s selfish and poorly conceived ideas. The announcement of the tax deadline “occasioned unusual outcry and supplications, but without avail. Such is the poverty of the inhabitants that most of them will be obliged to sell their houses, furniture, and clothing in order to raise money.” Riding past a village one day, Campbell witnessed a tax official being shouted down by the inhabitants, and screaming that he would return with a hundred soldiers of the Guard to be quartered among the population until all taxes were collected.

  The miners of Rio refused outright to pay any taxes. Napoleon sent Pons to deliver a proclamation on his behalf, which said that anyone failing to pay would be immediately fired from the mines. Following Napoleon’s instructions, Pons told his workers that just as he held a father’s affection for them, so did he feel “all the devotion of a good son” for the emperor. Napoleon had quietly granted him authority to draw from the treasury to front funds to anyone who needed help meeting their tax requirements, so long as they agreed to have the amount deducted from future paychecks. In the end only twenty workers applied to Pons for loans and the Rio taxes were collected without issue.

  But a much fiercer rebellion took place at the hilltop village of Capoliveri, which already had such a reputation for intransigence that a dozen policemen were dispatched to escort the tax collector. Pons described the people of Capoliveri as “the dregs of the Elban population.” The villagers greeted the arriving official and his policemen with horns and clanging pots and a representative announced their refusal to pay, citing as their reason that it could not be legally proved that the tax collector wasn’t an impostor working independently of Napoleon to line his own pockets. Then the villagers chased the collector and the overwhelmed gendarmes down the hill and out of town.

  The next day two emissaries chosen from the local population returned to announce that Capoliveri had twenty-four hours to pay. They said that Napoleon demanded a list of the rebellion’s chief instigators. But the twenty-four-hour deadline came and went. Pons thought that Napoleon chose the wrong two men to serve as his emissaries, since they lacked the experience and “public esteem” to handle the situation. For the time being Napoleon took no further action against Capoliveri.

  Campbell thought that after only two months of Napoleon’s rule, Elba already lay on the verge of a general uprising. “Napoleon appears to become more unpopular on the island every day, for every act seems guided by avarice and a feeling of personal interest with a total disregard to that of others,” he wrote. “The inhabitants perceive that none of his schemes tend to ameliorate their situation and that while the blessings of peace have restored to their neighbours commerce, a ready sale for the produce of their labours, exemption from contributions and from military service, they derive none of these advantages by Napoleon’s arrival among them.”

  He no longer heard the hails for the emperor as he once had, despite Bertrand’s obvious efforts “to give popular effect to every movement.” All around the island people were railing “against his oppression and injustice. . . . The more he is brought upon a level with others and the more the opportunities of observing him, the more unfavorably does he appear.” Campbell worried that unless Napoleon acted with more “discretion” going forward, only “the military force of his Guards” could keep him safe from total revolution, and he wondered if Napoleon was in danger of losing the loyalty of his soldiers as well:

  Even the attachment of his Guards to him diminishes daily. They will soon tire of having expatriated themselves, and as all the officers were confident of his being called to the throne of France in a very few months they perceived daily that there’s less prospect of realizing the expectations formed upon these grounds.

  He’d heard a soldier comparing Elba to a foxhole, and a second to a desert, and a third, after being assigned to settle Pianosa, had privately told Campbell he would rather “blow his brains out” than stay there.

  With his ears already pricked for any troubling talk, Campbell would continue to hear similar grumbling from the locals and low-ranking soldiers throughout the summer. And some of his men did desert, while those who stayed endured occasional abuse, especially at the hands of Cambronne, who, lacking action, had sunk into a depression and would vent his frustration by slapping clumsy troops with the edge of his saber. But Campbell underestimated the loyalty that Napoleon inspired in his soldiers, especially the veterans of the Old Guard. Even after the Russian disaster and its half million casualties, they still loved him. A slap or two during drill in some sunny square on a Tuscan island was nothing compared to the things they had seen. As another famous general once said of Napoleon, “Those h
e made suffer most, the soldiers, were the very ones who were most faithful to him.”

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  UBICUMQUE FELIX NAPOLEON

  RENOVATING THE MULINI became an obsession. At five each morning Napoleon would wander the grounds to supervise the work, dressed simply in silk stockings and shoes without buckles. If he felt like dirtying his hands he would play for a while at hammering, sawing, or painting and enjoyed the occasional noonday meal alongside his laborers, sharing hard bread and boiled eggs. Many summer nights found him still occupied with his tinkering. He grew a large garden on the Mulini’s craggy cliffside terrace, as though heeding the advice of that other famous exile that the best way to make life supportable was to tend one’s garden. He had a giant N done in heliotropes trimmed with military precision. Among the hedges visitors would sometimes spot a mischievous monkey, nicknamed Jénar, who served as the palace mascot.

  Drouot was tasked with shielding the Mulini from the realities of island life. Bada di sotto! (Look out below!) was a common refrain in town, as people emptied their pots out their windows through webs of clotheslines and linen. Drouot imposed a fine for anyone caught continuing the filthy custom and gave property owners two months to dig latrines that would be emptied each night at a far-off location, warning that failure to comply would result in a “sanitary tax.” He had the barracks whitewashed and fitted with proper drainage, the thin path from the main square paved, and he arranged for a crew to clean the Mulini’s lanes eight times a day. He instructed his officers to claim any of the town’s public gardens to tend as they saw fit.