by Mark Braude
From outside, the boxy and unadorned Mulini gave the appearance of modest prosperity. Inside, visitors were greeted with a bit more color and flair. The walls were pink, highlighted by bright green shutters. Napoleon had sent some soldiers to Piombino to raid the palace there, which had been occupied by his sister Elisa and her husband, the former Prince of Lucca, until their reign had fallen alongside his own. He assumed that they had left in a hurry and packed lightly. His men pilfered whatever they thought looked good, and no one in Piombino felt bold enough to stop them. Napoleon added to that expedition’s haul after a shipment of goods belonging to Pauline Bonaparte and the Prince of Borghese happened to be held up in poor weather at the docks at Livorno on its way to Rome. Napoleon sent troops to seize the cargo, joking to Pons that this way things would stay “in the family.” Even with this booty and help from Ussher, who drew from the Undaunted’s provisions to outfit the Mulini’s larder, Napoleon’s palace was still relatively bare and sparsely furnished. Elba lacked for fine materials and luxury craftspeople. The effect was underwhelming. One valet wrote that the sofa in the main salon had “so little stuffing that one could feel the cross pieces and the straps.”
The villa did have one great jewel. Before sailing from Fréjus, Bertrand bought a multivolume collection compiled by the famed linguist Baron Silvestre de Sacy, one of the first scholars to try deciphering the Rosetta Stone. The Mulini library’s holdings multiplied as more cases full of books arrived with the battalion of the Old Guard, while others were sourced on the cheap from libraries and estate sales around Europe. Aside from the floor polisher, only Napoleon’s secretary Deschamps was allowed to enter this sanctuary. Deschamps had to verify that each volume had arrived in good condition before Napoleon would allow Drouot to send payment for a shipment. The approved books were rebound and stamped with an imperial eagle or an N.
Napoleon’s way of apprehending the world was inherently literary. He fed on books like food, reading for pleasure, but always looking for some insight that could help guide him to bettering himself and his world, which was why he was so fond of history and the lives of rulers. He grew up in a house with a thousand-volume library that likely numbered among the greatest collections on Corsica. Among his collection at the Mulini he prized a forty-volume set of fairy tales. There were books of English grammar and a few study guides that placed French stories side by side with their English translations. He amused himself by seeking out works that had been censored during his reign and later said he usually failed to see why the police had suppressed them in the first place.
In his letters to Marie Louise, Napoleon claimed that all the work on the Mulini was being done solely for her comfort and for that of the child he persisted in calling the King of Rome, although with his abdication the boy could only technically claim the title of Prince of Parma. But Campbell was already doubtful that there would ever be a happy family reunion. “He has not made any such arrangements as evince any expectation of his being joined by Marie Louise,” he wrote, “nor has he mentioned her name in any way.” The laborers stopped calling the rooms they were working on the empress’s quarters and switched to calling them the princess’s, anticipating that Pauline Bonaparte would be their occupant.
With the renovations nearing completion, Napoleon turned his attentions to Porto Longone. He’d been charmed by the seaside village after admiring a hillside villa where two huge carob trees had provided shade for a table laid for sixty guests. He thought of setting up his own tree-lined aerie nearby in the former chambers of the garrison commander at the old Spanish citadel. It was a tough climb up to the fortress, so Napoleon had a zigzagging road laid that allowed him to enter the grounds by carriage. But he dropped the Porto Longone project, telling Pons he wanted some place farther out “in the country.”
He and Pons traveled to Monte Capanne, high above the northern town of Marciana. There they met the hermit who occupied a small dwelling next to the centuries-old chapel devoted to the holy virgin of Montserrat perched up in the rocks, its grotto fed by the crystal waters trickling down from the peak. The hermit had planted a few trees and some vines. He showed Napoleon and Pons a fig tree whose tentacular branches grew back down into the ground and took root there, so that a circle of smaller fig trees now surrounded it. He pointed to a peach tree yielding fruit so huge that each one seemed a small miracle. He motioned to the mountain of Cape Calamita in the distance and described its magnetic properties. Napoleon ventured that the place must look wonderful in a storm, surrounded by heavy clouds and lightning. The hermit answered that thunderstorms were frequent but with the protection of the holy virgin the hermitage had never been struck. Pointing to the surrounding peaks, Napoleon countered that these “splendid lightning conductors” might also have been of some help. They went over to the church to light a prayer candle. After lunch Napoleon drifted off for a few hours in the open air. Later he went to sit by himself on a large rock at the edge of a sloping hill, from which he would have seen Corsica.
Down at Marciana that evening he told Pons that these had been among the happiest hours he’d ever spent. He had plans drawn up for a mountain retreat, demarcating where his house would sit in relation to the hermitage and specifying how it would look. But he soon abandoned this project as well, telling Pons, “I’m not rich enough to achieve such a fantasy.”
For a moment he eyed Pons’s own house in Rio, which overlooked the ocean and had a gorgeous garden. It was the finest dwelling on the whole island, at least by Pons’s own estimation, but Napoleon eventually elected to “deprive himself” of this house for the sake of appearances, telling Pons he didn’t want the Elbans to think he was “persecuting” the mining administrator. Next he turned his attentions to a mildew-stained farmhouse in San Martino, a valley with oaks and brushwood climbing the foothills, where there were a few vineyards and the high ground provided views of Portoferraio and the ocean. Napoleon paid 180,000 francs for the house, likely with substantial help from the proceeds of some of Pauline’s jewelry collection. Pons thought he overpaid.
A sculptor brought over from Carrara to set up a school of art was told to abandon that project so he could dedicate himself to decorating the new property. An illustration of two doves joined by a string whose knot threatens to tighten the farther the birds fly apart adorned the drawing room ceiling and was said to represent the emperor and empress. The walls of Napoleon’s bedroom were painted to make it look like a tent, and the hallways were plastered with engravings taken from illustrated books on Egypt. The villa centered on a large hall, the Salle des Pyramides, made in accordance with Napoleon’s orders for a central room “paved with marble, having an octagonal basin in the centre with a fountain in the middle, as in Egypt.” The ceiling was painted with signs of the Zodiac and the walls with wild scenes of the desert, full of pyramids, columns, hieroglyphs, minarets, palm trees, and charging Mameluke warriors.
The Egyptian campaign clearly loomed large while Napoleon was in exile, perhaps because in the desert he’d experienced a similar sense of solitude and removal from French affairs. He was sent there in 1798 in part as a kind of banishment, a way for the five directors then heading the government to keep him far from the center of power just at the moment that people across France were reading more regularly about this young upstart and his military exploits, thanks to the increasing spread of print media. Ever since that campaign, Egypt had served as Napoleon’s fantasy space, a focus for his romantic imagination. It was where, as he wrote, “I found myself freed from the obstacles of an irksome civilization. I was full of dreams. I saw myself founding a religion, marching into Asia, riding an elephant, a turban on my head and in my hand a new Koran that I would have composed to suit my need.” To the veterans of the Old Guard the San Martino house prompted memories of another distant locale; they dubbed the property Saint-Cloud, the name of the suburban chateau overlooking the Seine west of Paris that had been the site of Napoleon’s 1799 coup and later one
of his main seats of power.
Napoleon found a job for a young Elban woman of limited means, who became the property’s gatekeeper during the renovations. As a valet described, she was “sort of a Napoleonic fanatic, and as such was wholly devoted to His Majesty,” and each time Napoleon arrived at the gates she sang him a new ditty composed in his honor. He called her “his madwoman.”
Napoleon pushed his soldiers too hard on the Saint-Cloud renovations and after a few days of heavy work some of the grenadiers refused to continue, complaining that it was beneath their station. Napoleon understood that he’d insulted them and reworded his directive in the form of a personal request to his soldiers in a time of need, rather than an official order. He pushed back the deadlines to give the men more time for rest. The work resumed without further issue, but for the sake of appearances Napoleon sent a few of the insubordinates to Pianosa and the ringleaders back to France.
Napoleon lost interest in the San Martino property almost as quickly as he had the others and slept there only a few nights in all. He showed the same restlessness in France, where he’d once overseen as many as forty-seven palaces, and was shuffling between his main residences at Malmaison, the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne (but never Versailles, tainted by its Old Regime associations), as though away from battle he needed to mimic the flurry of a campaign. The results were invariably disappointing. “I’ve seen no chateau, no palace, that can please me,” he once said.
And yet it was at San Martino on a painted column on the wall of the Salle des Pyramides that someone, presumably the emperor, scrawled Ubicumque felix Napoleon (Napoleon can be happy anywhere).
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SIROCCO
ON CERTAIN DAYS WHEN high Saharan winds blew in from the south, a note of despair seeped into Campbell’s journal entries. He busied himself by blackening pages, “keeping my journal to assist my memory, writing my despatches and taking copies of them, obtaining information from a variety of parties in Italy.” But he found even these simple tasks difficult because of his wounds. “I have no one to assist me, and when I write long there is a wearisome feeling which becomes very unpleasant from the muscles in my back not having yet acquired their tone.” That summer was the hottest anyone on Elba could remember in years.
Campbell still hadn’t received any word from Castlereagh giving him more insight into his role on Elba or to say whether the Foreign Office would devote any more resources to supporting his mission. A single British ship, the sloop Partridge, had been assigned to patrol the region, but it was based out of Livorno and only included Elba as one part of its longer regular cruise between Genoa and Civitavecchia. Any ship that came to Elba was subjected to quarantine and passport inspection, but once cleared its passengers could move about however they wished, and Napoleon was free to receive visitors as he liked. Campbell could hardly keep track of the emperor’s meager entourage, let alone anyone else who might be roaming the island.
It was his French neighbors on Elba who often updated Campbell about pertinent developments on the continent, though sometimes they passed along false or misinterpreted reports. “Bertrand showed me in one of the French journals a paragraph wherein it was stated that the rank of colonel on the continent and in Elba has been conferred on me,” Campbell wrote in June. “I am induced to believe that this may have been copied from the London Gazette and that therefore my remaining here is the pleasure of the Prince Regent, although I have not received any orders to that effect.” In fact the Gazette had only included Campbell’s name among a long list of officers and had given his existing rank, “Colonel in the Army.” There was no mention of Elba.
Campbell’s insecurities prompted him toward all sorts of speculation. “I have reason to believe that a Neapolitan officer has been here privately,” he wrote in his journal. “A person in that uniform was seen to enter Napoleon’s house about two weeks ago, and from my not being able to trace him it appears that pains have been taken to conceal the circumstance.” He wondered if his own servant might be a spy in Napoleon’s service.
In some ways Campbell would have felt his exile more painfully than Napoleon did. Whenever he visited the Mulini he was viewed with suspicion, and the Elbans never really understood why he was on the island in the first place. Ussher’s departure left him no countrymen with whom to commiserate, and there weren’t any officially accredited British diplomats nearby, as none were yet posted to Italy. Campbell dealt mostly with agents and go-betweens.
Most frustrating of all was that he still failed to see any real logic, pattern, or overarching goal driving his counterpart’s actions. “Napoleon continues in the same state of perpetual movement, busy with constant schemes, none of which, however, tend to ameliorate the condition of his subjects,” he wrote. He didn’t seem to have any grand plan but was instead preoccupied with pursuing several pet projects at once. He had peasants smoothing out the roads where he liked to ride in his carriage; he had soldiers knocking down old houses to gather materials with which to improve his various properties; and he had plans to plant three thousand trees in Portoferraio to make a leafy promenade from the city gates. There were rumblings that he was going to triple the tax rate to pay for all his new projects. None of it made any sense to Campbell.
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A FIRST DETACHMENT of soldiers sailed over to Pianosa on the Inconstant, bringing cannons, mortars, and ammunition, two cows, and thirty chickens. They had been given enough biscuit, brandy, and wine to tide them over for a few weeks and were told to slaughter all the wild goats they found to make way for future crops. The goal was to establish crops in soil more fertile than on Elba, which would be helped by the building of an irrigation works.
Napoleon wanted this first round of settlers to spend their first days on Pianosa in some caves that had been used as tombs, figuring it would make them work harder on building their barracks. His orders specified that the sappers should have the caves “cleaned out, first lighting some fires to burn the insects.” This was hardly the limit to his level of specificity when it came to colonizing Pianosa. He wrote orders naming the priest of the Elban town of Campo as curate of a newly created Pianosa parish. “He will take his vestments and holy vessels and say mass in the open air until the church is ready,” Napoleon ordered. “The village will be built according to designs submitted to my approval.”
Napoleon declared that Pianosa now belonged entirely to him since there was no specific landholder on record. And although it was already too late to plant for the year’s harvest, he set strict rules for future yields, which would be transported to Elba to be sold at prices set by himself. He subjected the Neapolitan coral fishermen who traditionally worked around Pianosa to a new tax, which was to be paid toward an “office of public works” that had yet to be built.
Having brought his wife and child over with him and not very keen to have them sleep in a cave full of interred bodies, Pianosa’s new commanding officer, Major Gottmann, ordered his lieutenant to have the sappers build him a house before seeing to any other work. The lieutenant answered that Napoleon had made clear that arming the battery was the first order of business and had specified that they should complete this task no more than forty-eight hours after landing. He added that it was common sense to make this a priority since they could all be killed by pirates if they failed to set guns up before nightfall. Fists were raised, but eventually Gottmann yielded.
The next few days brought fierce storms that kept Pianosa cut off from Elba while supplies dwindled. The soldiers made due with a few slaughtered goats and shellfish scraped from the rocks. They ran out of wine. When the weather cleared, Drouot sent over some sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs, as well as a few doors and locks and hourglasses he found in a junk heap at Portoferraio. When Napoleon heard the first discouraging reports from Pianosa he told Drouot that he couldn’t understand “what all the complaints are about,” and so they saile
d across to see things for themselves. Another storm kept them on board their ship overnight.
Napoleon would soon lose interest in seeing Pianosa properly settled. A short while later, Major Gottmann suffered a breakdown in Portoferraio, standing in the middle of a main road and raving complaints about Napoleon and Pianosa until Bertrand came and threatened him with arrest. Pons thought that Napoleon had actually conceived the whole Pianosa debacle solely as a make-work project to keep the unstable Gottmann away from Portoferraio after several complaints about his conduct.
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• • •
IN THE EARLY YEARS of Napoleon’s career, conquest, expansion, mobilizations, and reinforcements had been his most pressing concerns, but in the second half, dynastic rule, monuments, and a young second wife expressed his need for legacy. On Elba, denied any chance for territorial gain, he focused on the building of things and institutions and homes and laws that would survive him, a tremendous effort to fill his limited space with as much time as possible.
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SULTRY CONFINEMENT
IN EARLY JULY, Campbell left Elba for a short trip to the Tuscan coast. He gave no warning to anyone in Napoleon’s entourage and the only person he told about his plans was a man named Ricci, who had been the island’s British representative before the French annexation years earlier, and managed to stay on despite the regime change. Campbell asked him to write if anything important happened while he was away. He made no other arrangements for keeping watch over Napoleon.