The Invisible Emperor

by Mark Braude

  No one officially controlled Campbell’s movements. But he wrestled with his decision to leave nonetheless, arguing with himself in his journal that the travel was necessary because it would

  relieve my mind and prove a very acceptable release from the sultry confinement of Elba, besides assisting me in my public duties, which luckily do not require my banishing myself entirely in that island. . . . The evident restlessness of Napoleon’s disposition, his plans for sending out officers to various parts of Italy in order to recruit soldiers clandestinely, there being no British Minister in Italy, and indeed scarcely a public and recognized agent between Vienna and Sicily—all this made me anxious to compare my suspicions with what information I could obtain on the Continent.

  After docking at Livorno, Campbell traveled to the thermal baths at Lucca, seeking relief from his wounds and treatment for his “increasing deafness.” Next, in Florence, he met with an Austrian general, Count Stahremberg, who commanded forces throughout much of northern Italy. He showed Campbell some letters from Napoleon to various relatives that his agents had intercepted. The letters were unremarkable, which Stahremberg thought was the point; he was, wrote Campbell, “convinced they were sent merely to blind their other correspondence, carried on through more direct and clandestine channels.”

  In Florence, Campbell was watched closely by a French diplomat, Jean-Guillaume, baron Hyde de Neuville, a devoted royalist who had returned to France after nearly a decade in exile in the United States. Louis XVIII had posted him to Florence to gather information about Napoleon’s conduct on Elba, though his official mission was to oversee “the suppression of the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean.” Before leaving for his post, he’d met with his old friend the British admiral Sidney Smith in London. “Don’t you think that before Napoleon left Fontainebleau he looked at a map?” Smith had asked him. “Is the distance between Elba and the southern coast of France of any significance to a man who has marched from one end of Europe to another?”

  Hyde de Neuville’s memoirs reveal that Campbell’s trip to the mainland offered more than medical treatment and work. He saw Campbell several times at soirées hosted by the Countess of Albany, who had set up in Florence after the death of her husband, Bonnie Prince Charlie. On one of these nights, a mysterious Italian noblewoman, the Contessa Miniaci, captured Campbell’s attentions. Hyde de Neuville wrote that no one ever learned much about the “ravishing” contessa’s origins. She spoke many languages and seemed to know everyone in Florence worth knowing, but no one could say where she came from. Campbell was especially attentive to Miniaci. “Each time he came from Elba he brought her the latest news,” wrote Hyde de Neuville, who hinted in his memoir that Miniaci was a Bonapartist agent and that she seduced Campbell to recruit him to that cause. Little is known about her. She could have been working for any one of the allied powers, or for the Bourbons, or for Napoleon, or for no one at all.

  Campbell requested a change of assignment shortly after meeting Miniaci, writing to a senior officer to ask if he could be posted in a diplomatic capacity somewhere on the Tuscan mainland from where he would be available to travel to Elba as needed. He tried to convince himself of the soundness of this request in his journal, writing that Napoleon’s

  schemes begin to connect themselves so openly with the neighboring continent, and my information from Elba is so very detailed and correct, I think the spirit of my duties will for the present be better fulfilled by not shutting myself up in quarantine.

  Campbell’s association with Napoleon made him an object of fascination on the mainland. Playing at cards one night in Florence with the grand duke of Tuscany and his daughters, he fielded “some questions of curiosity about Napoleon,” as he recalled, and passed along the emperor’s respects to the duke. Hyde de Neuville thought Campbell showed an unusual and dangerous enthusiasm for Napoleon. He could tell that Campbell would have made a capable enough commander in the field, but in the salons and ballrooms of Florence, among Swedish consuls, Russian generals, and Austrian counts, Campbell struck him as a man out of place, “mixed up in major diplomatic affairs.”

  Campbell’s tour then took him to Rome to meet with Pius VII, who received him lying in bed with a pillow propped behind his back. He told Campbell that with all the turmoil in the Kingdom of Naples and the closeness of Bonaparte family members to Elba, these were uneasy times for the Holy See. His officials were working furiously to overturn all inroads made by the French, suspending the Napoleonic Code and reinstating feudal rights and traditional tribunals. They had even stopped street lighting and vaccinations in their bid to return to old ways. Italian clergymen were reclaiming properties and resuming their former practices, and most days of the week saw some kind of procession, church festival, or religious illumination. Church officials had resumed banning books, including the work of Machiavelli, which had once circulated freely, and innkeepers were pressured to supply names of anyone seen violating fast days.

  Campbell was disturbed by what he saw and heard during his Italian travels. Many people felt that whatever progressive gains had been made in the past years now risked being undone because of the power vacuum left by Napoleon’s fall. Campbell wrote that

  the public spirit in this part of Italy is not tranquil. For, notwithstanding there was an universal and violent dislike to the government of Bonaparte, the people view it now, when past, with less horror. . . . All possible means are taken to disseminate the idea of Bonaparte’s future return to influence and power, so that the impression becomes only too general.

  Campbell learned that Murat had added fifteen thousand men to his army since returning to Naples and that all sorts of demobbed soldiers, deserters, and adventurers were heading south to join him. An agent informed Campbell of the arrest of a family in Livorno whose members had been carrying lists of men pledging to serve Napoleon, six hundred names in all, and of an Elban officer caught recruiting soldiers in the same town. Campbell now suspected that another officer who had recently made a big noise about quitting Elba because he missed his family in the Piedmont region had in fact been sent there for recruiting purposes. For now, all he could do in his position was hope Napoleon’s agents would be watched “until sufficient proofs can be obtained of their employment,” as he wrote in his journal.

  He sailed back to Portoferraio and had a quick talk with Bertrand but then set off again for Livorno because Bertrand had told him Napoleon’s mother had just arrived there, bound for Elba, and Campbell wanted to get there in time to offer his services to ferry her across. He borrowed the British ship Grasshopper.

  A few days later in Livorno he connected with Letizia Bonaparte, known as Madame Mère. He liked her right off, finding her “very pleasant and unaffected . . . handsome, of middle size, with a good figure and fresh colour.” One of the Mulini’s valets would add that Madame Mère “must have been a beauty of the first rank in her youth,” for she had wonderful cheekbones, he thought, though now rouged to a level that “did not harmonize with her age.” She’d traveled from Rome incognito, but by the time Campbell walked with her from her inn to his waiting ship the townspeople had guessed her identity and hooted and whistled at her as she passed. She hadn’t helped her cause by stiffing some local musicians who, following the tradition of greeting any notable arrival to town with a song, had serenaded her at the inn; custom dictated that she return the gesture with a small gift of money, but she seemed to care little for the practice.

  A courier handed Campbell a letter as he was about to set sail, dated two weeks earlier. It was a brief message from Castlereagh to say that he’d received all of his dispatches and had shown them to the prince regent and that Campbell should

  continue to consider yourself as British resident in Elba, without assuming any further official character than that in which you are already received, and that you would pursue the same line of conduct and communication with this department.

  Campbell dined
alongside Letizia Bonaparte during the crossing, seated on plush couches that had been arranged for them on deck. She was keen to talk about all of the Bonaparte siblings. She’d given birth thirteen times before being widowed at age thirty, and eight of her children were still living. “Louis [the fifth oldest] seems to be a great favourite of hers,” wrote Campbell. “His picture is on her snuff-box. She said he’d written several romances, which she admired, and was sure would be generally esteemed, such as would be fit for young ladies to read. She spoke of his fortune as being small although he did not spend money either on play or women.”

  When Campbell asked after the health of the young empress, Madame Mère spoke of her daughter-in-law with “many sighs and expressions of great regard, as if her separation from Napoleon was not voluntary on her part.”

  { 19 }

  THE ONE-EYED COUNT

  MARIE LOUISE PASSED THE first weeks of summer shut away in the Schönbrunn Palace. She’d arrived in late May after a winding, monthlong journey from France by way of Switzerland, which nearly mimicked her bridal route in reverse. At one point she passed within eight miles of Paris, close enough to see the golden dome of the Invalides church. On reaching Vienna she’d gone to her bedroom in the west wing of Schönbrunn, where a portrait of her husband still hung. “What a heartrending fate mine is!” she wrote that night to a friend. “To slip out of the Emperor’s hands and leave poor France! God alone knows how great is my sorrow! How weak and powerless I am in this whirlwind of plotting and treachery!”

  She suspected that many of Napoleon’s letters weren’t reaching her and knew to use subterfuge when writing to him. Early in June she employed the help of a Polish officer attached to her court, who promised he could get a message through undetected. “I only wish your letter could come by means which seem as safe as these,” she wrote to Napoleon. “I need them so badly.” She said she was certain that a plot was being hatched to wrest Parma from her rightful possession and that her father was trying to keep her from leaving Vienna. She promised that she would find some way to get to Aix-les-Bains by feigning illness and that she would take their son as well.

  She kept mostly to herself at Schönbrunn, just beyond the city proper. Her attendant Baron Méneval was never far from her side, and she could also rely on her ladies-in-waiting, as well as her son’s governess, Madame de Montesquiou. When she tired of this cloistered company, Marie Louise would visit with her sympathetic grandmother Queen Marie-Caroline of Naples, who listened patiently to her complaints. The older woman considered Napoleon her worst enemy, a villain who had once taken all her property and was the inheritor of the revolution that had killed her sister, Marie Antoinette. But she also believed in the sanctity of marriage and told her granddaughter that she must fight to keep hers intact. “If I were in your place,” she said, “I should tie my sheets to a window and escape.”

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE END, a daring midnight escape wasn’t required. Instead, Marie Louise simply wore her father down, persuading him to let her travel to Aix-les-Bains for the good of her health, although he insisted that his grandson remain in Vienna. Francis secured permission from Louis XVIII for her safe passage through France by promising that she would be under strict medical supervision, that her convalescence would last no more than six weeks, and that she wouldn’t bring her son with her into French territory.

  Before leaving the castle, Marie Louise received a letter from Bertrand that gave her the first real details of her husband’s life on Elba. She replied directly to Napoleon, alluding to Bertrand’s letter, and telling him the update had pleased her immensely. She was thrilled to hear he was looking for a country house to complement his main residence. “Do please keep a little corner in it for me,” she wrote. “I hope you’ll let me be your agent for the plants and flowers; people declared it was most unjust of them not to let you have such things sent from Paris.” Because Bertrand’s letter said they were planning to send horses to meet her at Parma (where they assumed she would soon be headed), she told them to hold off on that for now. She wasn’t sure she would be able to feed them all, she said, since she was trying to “live as economically as possible.”

  She adopted a conciliatory tone when it came to family matters, telling Napoleon that Francis had

  anticipated my every wish. He told me there was not the least difficulty about my going to the spa, but advised me leave my son here for the time being . . . as I was going on to the French frontier it might be thought that I was wanting to disturb the peace, which might involve both me and my son in a certain amount of unpleasantness. . . . I know that he couldn’t be in safer hands than he is here. . . . I can’t tell you often enough how good my father is being to me.

  Around this time, a popular French caricature showed a mean-faced boy, the King of Rome, wielding a hangman’s noose in front of a shadowy Napoleonic bust adorned with what could be the ears of an ass or the horns of a cuckold. “It’s papa’s necktie,” reads the caption.

  On the first of July, Marie Louise traveled toward France, under the name of the Duchess of Colorno, which she took from the site of a royal summer residence in Parma. It was hardly possible for her and her thirty-three attendants to travel unnoticed, but she wanted to sidestep the political implications of still calling herself empress as she ventured into Bourbon lands, and she hoped a lower profile could save her from too many social engagements. “Receptions weary me so and are so boring,” she wrote to Napoleon from the road.

  Yet she made a point to visit her Bonaparte relations on the way down to Aix-les-Bains. In Munich, she dined with Napoleon’s stepson Eugène de Beauharnais and his Bavarian princess wife, Augusta, who had quietly withdrawn from public life after Eugène’s nine-year tenure as viceroy of Italy ended shortly after Napoleon’s abdication. At Payerne she visited the unhappy Jérôme Bonaparte, the former king of Westphalia, whose wife had just been robbed of the jewelry collection meant to ensure their future. And at the Château de Prangins on Lake Geneva she shared a meal with Joseph Bonaparte, who according to Caulaincourt had tried to rape her the last time they had seen one another.

  When she reached Aix-les-Bains at midmonth she set up in a villa nestled above the thermal springs whose previous guests had been Napoleon’s first wife, Joséphine, and her daughter, Hortense, a visit that ended tragically when one of the ladies-in-waiting had slipped on a little bridge above a waterfall and fallen to her death.

  Marie Louise was joined at the spa town by an Austrian general named Adam von Neipperg, who had left a cushy position at Pavia to serve as escort to the archduchess. He’d come on secret orders from Metternich:

  With all necessary tact, the Count von Neipperg must turn the Duchess of Colorno away from all ideas of a journey to Elba, a journey which would greatly upset the paternal feelings of His Majesty, who cherishes the most tender wishes for the well-being of his well-loved daughter. He must not fail therefore to try by any means whatsoever to dissuade her from such a project.

  The roguish general, a champion duelist and brilliant musician, had ample means with which to dissuade the duchess from hurrying to see her husband. He wore a black silk patch to cover the loss of an eye, but, as Marie Louise’s majordomo Méneval wrote, the wound “rather suited the ensemble of his face, which had a martial character,” and was framed by thick locks of curly blond hair. He could be equally charming in a host of languages. Not yet forty, he was already the father of five children with his former mistress, who had recently become his wife after the death of her first husband, who happened to be Neipperg’s best friend. Before leaving for Aix-les-Bains, Neipperg had bet his wife that within a few months he would have a new mistress, the archduchess.

  He quickly pushed Méneval out of the way to establish himself as Marie Louise’s main handler. He saw to it that her apartments were comfortable and orderly and had her piano tuned by an expert. Mornings he would row her out on Lac du Bour
get and afternoons he would take her for walks around the town’s main square under the benevolent spirit of Diana, the huntress, to whom a small temple in the square had been devoted. Nights he accompanied her on the keyboard as she sang Mozart.

  A French spy assigned to watch Marie Louise was convinced that all of the frolicking was mere distraction from the fact that she’d come to Aix-les-Bains to stir up popular sentiment for Napoleon. She had, after all, arrived at the resort in a carriage still bedecked with Bonaparte arms, and the spy had yet to see her actually taking the cure. “I just can’t believe it’s solely for the sake of her health that she’s come to France,” he wrote to his superiors in Paris. “If one is in poor health one doesn’t spend the day walking about, going out on carriage-rides or on horseback.”

  In late July, Marie Louise wrote to tell Napoleon that she planned to go to Parma as soon as possible and assured him she was only taking so long between letters for the sake of security, just in case he might think her “capable of forgetting” him. She said she suffered from not hearing more news from him. “Nevertheless, Darling,” she wrote, “I feel certain that you have written, and that you think about me sometimes.” She said that she still thought it best for their son to stay in Vienna, and that she was pleased to be away from there, especially since the upcoming peace conference would have forced her to be “in the same city as the allied sovereigns.” She told him she was drinking the waters and “taking plenty of exercise” and that her health was improving. She’d sketched some nature scenes under the watch of her art tutor, who was thinking of sending one of his pupils to Elba to do Napoleon’s portrait. “I am living in the strictest incognito here,” she added. “My father has sent me General Neipperg, he’s quite nice and speaks well of you.”