by Mark Braude
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A PERFECTLY BOURGEOIS SIMPLICITY
APPROACHING PORTOFERRAIO, Madame Mère mounted one of the Grasshopper’s guns to get a better look at her son’s palace. The crew left her alone, having seen how confidently she handled her small, powerful frame. But when the ship docked on the night of August 2, no one was at the mole to greet her. Napoleon had expected her the day before, and when she’d failed to show, he’d figured she must have met with some long delay and had gone off riding without arranging for a greeting party.
Campbell suggested that Drouot or Bertrand could be brought to the harbor to formally announce her disembarkation. “She seemed greatly agitated and mortified at no one coming to her on their part and gave her assent with great violence, turning around quite pale and huffed,” he wrote. Drouot and Bertrand rushed down to the dock, with the mayor and an honor guard in tow, while the staff tried to gather a sufficient crowd along the marina. Meanwhile, a messenger found Napoleon riding at Marciana and he hurried back to his mother, trying to gain time by switching from carriage to rowboat so he could bypass a curving road, despite choppy seas.
She was soon set up in a small but comfortable house close to the Mulini, which Napoleon had rented from the local magistrate, Vantini. It wasn’t “a handsome house,” as Bertrand wrote to Méneval, but “she has plenty of room and certain comforts.” She’d planned to stay for a month, but after just a few days she decided to live there permanently, with two ladies-in-waiting and a retired French general as her chamberlain. She crowed in a letter to a friend that “the emperor has set me up in a pretty house next to his own. Every night we take a carriage ride or walk in his garden.”
She sent for the rest of her baggage and ordered renovations. “It pains me to see that work continues at the Vantini house, worse still because it doesn’t belong to me,” Napoleon wrote to Drouot. “A bill detailing all of Madame’s spending on the project should be presented to her: it’s the only way to get her from ordering any more work to be done.” In truth, she was much more of an economic help to Napoleon than a hindrance. By the time of the empire’s collapse she’d quietly set aside as much as three million francs in cash and about half that in jewels and property. She lived relatively humbly in Portoferraio, at a level of luxury not much different from what she would have enjoyed if the family had never left Corsica.
And as on Corsica, she once again held the role of proud matriarch of a notable island family. “I’ve seen eminent people more intimidated in front of her than in front of the Emperor,” wrote Pons. Though Napoleon sometimes chided his mother, he respected her advice. He was critical of his father, Carlo, a man he thought was “too fond of pleasure,” who died of cancer when Napoleon was fifteen, but his mother, he said, “could govern a kingdom; she has excellent judgment and never makes a mistake.” He dined at her house once a week and on Sundays she received palace guests in all her finery, accented by a feathered hat and her best diamonds.
Under her watch a sense of routine set in at the Mulini. Napoleon typically rose at seven, after having slept about six hours, far more sleep than he’d ever enjoyed during the height of his career. He started his day with a consultation from his personal physician and then dressed, usually in his uniform of a chasseur of the Guard with white cashmere culottes and silk stockings. His valets would have placed a snuffbox, reading glasses, and a little box of aniseed licorice in the pockets of his clothing. As he left his bedroom he would be handed his two-pointed hat, and he liked to start the day with a sip of broth and a nip of Constantia wine imported from Cape Town. Most mornings he headed to the harbor in his carriage, accompanied by a few of his officers. He might then survey the Guard as they presented arms, or stop for a quick chat with Bertrand.
In the early afternoon he downed a quick lunch, usually alongside Bertrand, Cambronne, and Drouot. The fare was simple and not too different from what he ate on campaign: lentils, white beans, or potatoes, accompanied by some Chambertin wine, followed by black coffee. Sometimes they went to a nearby beach for a picnic. In the open air Napoleon seemed most at ease. Pons remembered one carefree outdoor meal featuring an excellent bouillabaisse. “We ate, we drank, we sang,” he wrote. “It was the strangest thing. . . . We saw the emperor . . . happy.” During these trips outdoors Napoleon liked to practice his particular brand of ear-tugging, name-calling slapstick, the height of which he might have achieved on the day he slipped some live herring into Bertrand’s coat pocket and then asked if he could borrow a handkerchief. Once, on a ride down a country road with Pons and Bertrand, he told the two men to go ahead of him and race. Both men begged off, saying it would be no contest since Bertrand’s powerful charger, Euphrate, a gift from Napoleon, was four times the horse of the mingy Corsican that Pons rode, but Napoleon insisted and in the end Euphrate stumbled in a ravine and Napoleon declared Pons the winner by default. Pons recalled that Bertrand appeared to take the emperor’s taunts in his stride and seemed well accustomed to his playful abuse.
Following lunch Napoleon would usually draft letters and orders. After the initial burst of the first few weeks he slowed to handling one or two pieces of paperwork a day, a pace of work about a tenth of what he’d maintained in previous years. Unlike Robinson Crusoe, he kept no journal of his time as a castaway, which may be evidence that he anticipated from the very beginning that he wouldn’t be marooned there forever.
He took long salt baths in the afternoons, often while reading or dictating to his secretaries. During one of these baths he challenged his young valet to calculate the volume of water displaced by his body in the tub, and after the valet pled ignorance showed him how to do so. Following his baths he drenched himself in eau de cologne, usually some mix of bergamot, citrus, and lavender or rosemary. He obsessed over his appearance and shaved daily.
In the early evenings he would take a carriage ride or row out into the roadstead to watch the sunset. He liked to see the ships passing through the channel separating Portoferraio and Piombino, which he later recalled as being “in continual movement; not a day went by when there weren’t several hundred boats passing through, of all sizes and of all nations.” Sometimes he stayed in to take a nap, which members of his staff noticed was the option he chose with increasing frequency. Occasionally he and Drouot played at pétanque, a game the latter man dominated because, as he told Napoleon, it was one at which it was impossible to cheat. Some evenings were spent hunting or fishing. A valet recalled a trip in the company of some local fishermen on the search for tuna, from which Napoleon returned, laughing, covered in seawater and blood.
Nights at the Mulini unfolded with what Pons called “a perfectly bourgeois simplicity.” After dining with family, his generals, and a few guests, Napoleon would press some lackeys into being conquered at cards. The favorite game was réversis, similar to hearts, or they played at the ivory dominoes Napoleon had specially made for the palace. Peyrusse was a regular tablemate, but best of all was if Madame Mère could be persuaded to join. Unlike his retainers, she was unafraid to confront Napoleon about his frequent misdeeds at the table. “Napoleon, you’re cheating,” she would say calmly, and he would put his hands on the green felt, curl them around the napoleons lying there, and then carry off the haul to his bedroom, barking his protests. A valet would come to collect the money to be redistributed among its rightful owners the next morning. There were variations on this little drama: sometimes instead of stomping off, Napoleon would meet the accusation of “You’re cheating, son,” with “You’re rich, mother,” and they would laugh it off before play resumed. Napoleon had never shown himself so wild for games of chance as he did on Elba, perhaps because the freedom of the unknown result is one of the few that can be enjoyed inexhaustibly and regardless of location.
When ready to retire, usually around ten, Napoleon would wander over to a little piano and play a few clumsy measures from Haydn’s Symphony No. 94, nicknamed the “Surprise” symphony for some abrupt fortissi
mo chords that sneak up on listeners during the otherwise peaceful second movement. This was the signal for bedtime preparations.
Sometimes the household staff would hear Napoleon in the early hours of the morning pacing his garden, which was lit through the night by two giant alabaster vases with candles placed inside. He sang to himself, emphasizing unlikely syllables in his lilting Corsican accent.
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TALL FANNY AND THE TWO EMPRESSES BONAPARTE
FANNY BERTRAND REACHED ELBA in August with her three children. In their letters, she and Henri had wavered about her making the journey at all, fearing that she and the children might lose their standing as French citizens if they joined the exile, and that the sadness of the separation from her grandchildren might kill Henri’s elderly mother. They had even briefly considered leaving one of the children behind, so she would at least have one grandchild to care for.
Most of the family’s income had come in the form of rewards from Napoleon that were pegged to public funds in a complicated setup, which left them with little ready cash. The bulk of their wealth was eventually seized by the Bourbons. Henri kept close watch on Fanny’s spending, complaining in one letter that she’d spent more in the past three weeks than he had in three months. He pressured her to sail to Elba not from Piombino, which was a shorter and easier journey, but from Marseille because it was cheaper. Before leaving home she fired nearly all the members of her household staff.
On the way to Marseille she was stopped in the town of Bourges by a French prefect who was following a tip that she would be passing through and carrying letters for Napoleon. After riffling through her trunks and searching her carriages, he found twelve letters, which he kept, and then freed Fanny to go while her maid and coachman repacked her trunks by the side of the muddy road. The prefect had missed finding a copy of the Treaty of Fontainebleau, which no one on Elba had yet seen, and a letter concerning Marie Louise’s finances that Fanny had socked away more carefully than the others. Word got round of her shabby treatment at the hand of the royalist official, which got rougher with each telling, and in the taverns of the Bertrand hometown of Châteauroux someone made up a sad and secret song about the exile of “Tall Fanny” (she stood nearly six feet), which eventually spread across the country.
The moment Napoleon saw her in Portoferraio he took Fanny for a private ride in his carriage so she could tell him of the latest developments in France. Later, on Saint Helena, she told Baron Gourgaud that she’d been the first person to inform Napoleon of Joséphine’s death. She was a distant relation of Joséphine’s, who along with Napoleon had orchestrated her engagement to the older Henri, a union to which she’d at first objected, saying to Napoleon, “What, Sire! Bertrand! Why not the Pope’s Monkey!” When she told Napoleon about Joséphine’s death, as she later recalled, “his face did not change; he only exclaimed; ‘Ah! she is happy now!’” Gourgaud wrote that he was sure Fanny would have handled the task with great sympathy and tact, because she was the only person on Saint Helena with “humane instincts and a feeling heart.” (That she seemed to him so tenderhearted during that final exile was all the more impressive, given how much she hated Saint Helena, which she described by saying, “The Devil shit this island as he flew from one world to another.”)
Napoleon shut himself away at the Mulini and called for two days of mourning. Later, he said that divorcing Joséphine had marked the start of his slow and steady decline. He told Baron Gourgaud:
I think, although I loved Louise very sincerely, that I loved Josephine better. That was natural: we had risen together, and she was a true wife, the wife I had chosen. She was full of grace, graceful even in the way she prepared herself for bed, graceful in undressing herself.
As with Napoleon, Joséphine was both an islander and an outsider. She was, he said, “the wife who would have gone with me to Elba.” On his own death (another island, another camp bed) her name was his final word. The full sentence, whispered, was “France . . . the head of the army . . . Josephine.”
While shut away at the Mulini, Napoleon wrote several times to Marie Louise, apparently feeling her pull strongly in the wake of Joséphine’s death. He’d collected all her letters, which were numbered, and had spotted gaps in the sequence. He could tell by their wear that they had passed through many hands before reaching his. He admonished Marie Louise for not having written to him since leaving Vienna, though she had in fact written, and it was only that some of those letters were intercepted and destroyed, while others would only reach him much later. He told her that her rooms were ready and that he wanted to see her “in September for the vintage,” adding that Pauline was due to arrive around the same time. He reminded her that
no one has any right to stand in the way of your coming. I have written to you on the point. So mind you come. I am awaiting you with impatience. . . . Complain of their behavior to you in preventing a woman and a child from writing to me. Such behavior is despicable.
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TAKING THE CURE
AS JULY GAVE WAY to August, Marie Louise waited for her father to advise her of the date she should leave Aix-les-Bains to take up her reign in Parma. “I’ll never consent to return to Vienna before the departure of the sovereigns,” she told Méneval, “and I’ll try to have my son back.” She was tiring of the thermal baths and told Méneval that she knew the multiple treatments she’d taken so far must be having some effect, but that her sadness kept her from feeling any better. “There are some moments,” she said, “when my head is so troubled that I think the best I could do would be to die.”
Her letters to Napoleon from this time contained little other than complaints of loneliness and the details of her medical regime, including one in which she copied out her physician’s diagnosis: “Her complexion is good, her colour natural, her appetite quite regular, and her sleep would be sound were it not interrupted by hot flushes.” She told Napoleon that she’d heard their son was recovering from a toothache and she described the Austrian officer who had lately joined her retinue. In one letter she devoted nearly the whole of the closing four paragraphs to describing his positive influence on her:
I am very pleased with General Neipperg, whom my father has appointed to attend on me. He talks about you so pleasantly and in a way which goes straight to my heart, for I need to talk about you during this cruel absence.
On August 18 she wrote Napoleon a long letter, perhaps finally writing in detail because she was confident that this one was sure to get through undetected. An officer had stashed the letter among his luggage and promised to take it personally to Elba, which he did. She told Napoleon that she was “surrounded by police and by Austrian, Russian, and French counter police” and that “General Neipperg told me he had in his pocket orders to intercept every letter I might write you.” She swore she’d been writing to him regularly and that she’d begged for their son to be sent to her, but that her plans had been foiled and that her father now ordered her “back to Vienna for the congress, where my son’s interests are to be discussed.” She hinted that being back in Vienna would at least give her a better chance of fighting for her rights to Parma, anticipating that the Bourbons planned to take these lands from her during congress negotiations. “I wanted to go to Parma, they refuse to let me,” she wrote. She claimed that there were French officers at Aix-les-Bains who had orders to arrest her if she even headed in the general direction of Elba. She also said that “taking the waters” had “improved my health most wonderfully.” The letter closed with, “Remember me to Madame. I send you a kiss and love you dearly. Your loving and devoted Louise.”
The next day she wrote to her father to say she would soon be leaving Aix-les-Bains to go home to Vienna, as he desired. Her pace would be leisurely but she would try to time her arrival to coincide with the Feast of Saint Francis of Assisi on October 4, his name day. She asked if Neipperg could accompany her, for “he may be extremely useful to me on various occasions.�
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Four days later, a French captain named Hurault de Sorbée arrived at Aix-les-Bains. Napoleon had sent him to Genoa on the Inconstant with orders to collect his wife and bring her immediately to Elba and in the meantime had tried to get letters through to Méneval to advise him in advance, though none had reached him. Hurault’s wife, an Austrian, was Marie Louise’s personal reader, so he arrived at Aix-les-Bains under the pretext of a conjugal visit. He found Marie Louise and handed her a letter from her husband explaining the plan: they must leave the spa town at once for Genoa, where the Inconstant waited to take them to Elba.
Marie Louise asked for a moment to think in private. After the captain left her, she went to Neipperg, who had him arrested. He was sent to prison in Paris, but was later quietly released, as Talleyrand wanted to avoid stirring up any romantic Bonapartist spirit by publicizing the captain’s failed adventure. Reporting on the incident to Metternich, Neipperg wrote that “the idea of the journey [to Elba] seems to inspire more fear than a desire to be reconciled with her husband.” But whether Marie Louise performed such fearfulness specifically for Neipperg’s benefit remains unclear.
A few days later she wrote to her father, “Be assured that I am now less than ever desirous of undertaking that voyage [to Elba], and I give you my word of honor that I will never undertake it without asking your permission.” Next she wrote to a friend about her husband’s “thoughtless” and “self-centered” demands, saying that the idea of a daring “escapade” aboard Hurault’s waiting ship was ludicrous. “Really, the Emperor is so casual, so unreliable,” she wrote, complaining that the revelation of his failed plan could have