by Mark Braude
“Being still unable . . . to accompany”: Campbell, Napoleon, 153.
“to attend . . . directed to reside”: Campbell, Napoleon, 153–55.
“discretion as to the mode”: Campbell, Napoleon, 155. That this choice of words told him it was to be a clandestine assignment, see Gruyer, Napoleon, 99.
Castlereagh would have wanted: We don’t know how precisely he came to choose Campbell, but I base my claim on the fact that Castlereagh had plenty of bright, decorated, and loyal officers to choose from, many with more seniority than Campbell, and that he knew each man’s credentials inside and out, having personally appointed nearly the entirety of the British Diplomatic Service. It appears he may have first offered the job to a more seasoned, though younger diplomat, the stately John Fane, Lord Burghersh, who along with his adventurous young wife, Priscilla, had traveled closely alongside Castlereagh during the last campaign, during which Lady Burghersh read Byron by the battlefields. It was said that his great wealth had robbed Burghersh of much ambition. Burghersh claimed to his father that he declined the Elban assignment because he didn’t fancy leaving Paris just then, and besides, as he wrote, “I don’t think I should have gained credit. On the contrary, I should have honored the beast Napoleon too much in dancing attendance upon him.” When Jacques-Claude Beugnot, minister of the interior and future director of the police, returned to his Parisian apartment that month he found Burghersh comfortably quartered there and in no rush to leave, telling Beugnot that he’d grown particularly fond of his library. Burghersh may have been persuaded to turn down the assignment by his wife, who knew she wouldn’t be allowed to be a camp follower this time around and who found the whole thing unpleasant. “I am in the greatest rage that ever was tonight!” she wrote to a friend from Paris on April 13. “Just as I was beginning to enjoy myself and be quite happy here, thinking all my lonely hours are at an end for ever, Burghersh is named to attend Napoleon to the Isle of Elba. . . . I would go with him with all my heart, but that they won’t allow and I suppose, indeed, I could not do so, as they will travel with him, dine with him &c. It will be just like guarding a wild beast.” Perhaps burned by the Burghershes, Castlereagh decided to find someone less senior, less wealthy, and unattached: Campbell. On Castlereagh’s achievements with the British Foreign Office, see Webster, Foreign Policy, 44–48. See also Weigall, Correspondence of Lord Burghersh, 60; Weigall, The Letters of Lady Burghersh, 224; and Beugnot, Mémoires, II, 87.
Born just a few weeks: Dallas, The Final Act, 39. Castlereagh, writes Dallas, “came from an offshore island, off an offshore island, yet he yearned to be part of the main; he was an Irishman, who became an Englishman, who wanted to be a European.”
He’d once cheered: Zamoyski, Rites, 42.
“in most melancholy terms”: Campbell, Napoleon, 156.
“on whom”: Campbell, Napoleon, 2.
“strange feeling that”: Campbell, Napoleon, 157.
He had seen Napoleon: Gray, “An Audience of One,” 604.
“I saw before me”: Campbell, Napoleon, 157. We don’t know what Campbell smelled like to Napoleon, who had a very keen sense of smell. “I have seen him move away from more than one servant, who was far from suspecting the aversion he had inspired,” wrote his secretary Baron Fain in 1813. See Kauffmann, The Black Room at Longwood, xvi.
Long and lanky: Scott, An Englishman, 90, described Campbell as tall and thin.
Learning that Campbell: The work of Ossian, supposedly an ancient Scottish poet, caused a craze after its “discovery” in the late eighteenth century, though these purportedly lost poems were in fact forged by the man claiming to have collected and translated them, James Macpherson. Napoleon was such a fan of Ossian that when his sister Pauline and her first husband, Charles Leclerc, had asked him as godfather to their firstborn son to choose his name, Napoleon had decided on the uncommon Dermide, a hero of many of these poems. Fraser, Pauline Bonaparte, 28. “very warlike”: Campbell, Napoleon, 158.
“Yours is the greatest”: Campbell, Napoleon, 159.
“expressed satisfaction at hearing”: Campbell, Napoleon, 159–60.
“I have been your greatest enemy”: Campbell, Napoleon, 159–60. Here we should pause to question the dependability of Campbell’s journal, which only came into the public view in 1869, when his nephew, a vicar named Archibald Neil Campbell MacLachlan, decided to transcribe the worm-eaten and faded journal that had been under lock and key in his drawer for several years. The younger Campbell added a brief biography of his uncle. I have tried to approach the source with the necessary skepticism. It does seem odd, for instance, that Napoleon said such flattering things about the British as recorded above, given that the same man in 1798 had said, “If my voice has any influence, England will never have an hour’s rest from us. Yes! Yes! War to the death with England! Always!—until she is destroyed!” We have no other witnesses to this conversation to corroborate or dispute Campbell’s account. And yet I think his recollections are likely quite accurate. In the coming months many others would observe Napoleon making sure that British visitors of all ranks heard him giving far headier praise to their country. And indeed Napoleon had been taught a healthy respect for Great Britain in school, even while learning to think of it chiefly as an enemy from a young age. Further, we can also reason that there was little for Campbell to gain by lying in his own unpublished journal. While he may, like so many other diarists, have secretly hoped his writing would be published after his death, which might have led him to puff up Great Britain as well as his own position by attributing false statements to Napoleon, even the most ardent patriot or self-aggrandizer hopefully recognizes that the posthumous gains of deceitful propaganda are minimal, and that a fair and true reckoning of events holds much more value, both literary and political, and Campbell strikes the reader of his journal as rational, above all. His memoirs, which span well beyond his time with Napoleon, offer an evenhanded recounting of events large and small, as he either witnessed them or heard of them firsthand from those involved. “If my voice has influence”: Bell, Total War, 233. Bell reminds us that “Napoleon, like most of the French at the time, routinely conflated England and Britain.” See Bell, 349. On Napoleon learning to respect but be antagonistic toward Britain, see Roberts, Napoleon, 13.
“or at any rate”: Hobsbawm, Revolution, 189. Hobsbawm reminds us that this openness wasn’t meant to extend to all careers, “and not to the top rungs of the ladder.” Napoleon and his equally precocious generals had captivated French men and women by their youthful ascension to power. As Hobsbawm notes, “In 1806, out of 142 generals in the mighty Prussian army, seventy-nine were over 60 years of age. . . . But in 1806, Napoleon (who had been a general at the age of twenty-four), Murat (who had commanded a brigade at twenty-six), Ney (who did so at twenty-seven) and Davout, were all between twenty-six and thirty-seven years old.” Hobsbawm, Revolution, 86.
Earlier in his life: By David Bell’s count, Napoleon encountered at least four serious assassination attempts during his life. Bell, Total War, 186.
He gave away cherished: Campbell, Napoleon, 171.
“the subject of punishment by impaling”: Campbell, Napoleon, 173. See also, MacKenzie, The Escape from Elba, 164.
He would have to pay: See Treaty of Fontainebleau, Article V.
Later, he wrote: Branda, La guerre secrète, 184; Englund, Napoleon, 418.
“This means 400,000”: Palmstierna, My Dearest Louise, 166–67. With the Treaty of Fontainebleau the French government also pledged to provide a healthy alimony for Joséphine, to whom Napoleon had promised three million francs a year when they divorced. See Treaty of Fontainebleau, Articles II, III, and IV.
He failed to mention: Metternich, Memoirs, II, 549.
But she was already: King, Vienna, 101.
Emperor Francis wrote: Branda, La guerre secrète, 43–44.
“he’ll be a good, kind father”: Palmstierna
, My Dearest Louise, 176.
She never got the letter: Palmstierna, My Dearest Louise, editorial commentary, 176.
Metternich’s band of spies: Zamoyski, Rites, 84.
Indicating the hallway: Campbell, Napoleon, 176–77.
Roustam later claimed: Branda, La guerre secrète, 42; Roustam, Souvenirs, section IV (consulted online, without page numbers given).
“Do not lament”: For details of the Fontainebleau farewell, see Napoleon, Correspondance, XXVII, 362, and XXXI, 2; Chateaubriand, Memoirs, 268. The Cour du Cheval Blanc came to be known as the Cour des Adieux.
Napoleon later said: Gourgaud, Talks, 167.
Working together in: In the early 1940s, having escaped the Nazis by fleeing to America, thanks to help from James Joyce, the Austrian Jewish novelist Hermann Broch finished his dreamy Death of Virgil, in which he imagined Virgil wandering Brundisium in the last hours of his existence. In describing Napoleon on his last at Fontainebleau, I couldn’t help but think of the words Broch used to describe the Roman poet in the summer of 19 BC, which could also apply to the French emperor in the spring of 1814, and provide this chapter’s title: “He had become a rover, fleeing death, seeking death, seeking work, fleeing work, a lover and yet at the same time a harassed one, an errant through the passions of the inner life and the passions of the world, a lodger in his own life.” Hermann Broch, The Death of Virgil (Pantheon, 1945).
3: NAPOLEON IN RAGS
A dozen cavalrymen: Accounts of the journey south can be found in “Ali,” Napoleon, 72; Branda, La guerre secrète, 47; Campbell, Napoleon, 36–41; Gruyer, Napoleon, vii; Monier, A Year of the Life; Napoleon, Correspondance, XXXI, 2–10; Roncière, Napoleon’s Letters, 273–74; Schuermans, Souverain, 415–18; Waldbourg-Truchsess, Nouvelle relation, 14–48.
The young paymaster: Peyrusse, Mémorial, 220; Pons, Souvenirs, 75.
Those joining the exile: Treaty of Fontainebleau, Article XVIII.
Most of these followers: Branda, La guerre secrète, 118.
The devoted Caulaincourt: Branda, La guerre secrète, 42.
If Napoleon remained: Some might also have joined the exile simply for the chance to live in unprecedented proximity to Napoleon. Antoine Lilti makes a similar point about Las Cases’s motivations for joining the final exile on Saint Helena. Lilti, Celebrity, 207.
Santini scrounged up: Chautard, Santini, 24–25.
Napoleon had offered: Nollet-Fabert, Drouot, 115–17. See also Serieyx, Drouot.
Drouot had thought: Branda, La guerre secrète, 96.
Campbell suspected that: Campbell, Napoleon, 29.
To be insulted: Dallas, The Final Act, 259.
Royalist and Catholic: Branda, La guerre secrète, 49; Price, Napoleon, 244.
“The countryside”: Sauvigny, Bourbon Restoration, 50. For a thoughtful discussion on the difficulties that Napoleonic scholars face in navigating the “fragmentary” archival records left by prefects and other bureaucrats, who may have downplayed or exaggerated reports of Napoleon’s popularity depending on their relative positions of power within the state at any given moment, see Hazareesingh’s introduction to The Legend of Napoleon.
The Prussian commissioner: Waldbourg-Truchsess, Nouvelle relation, 25–30.
He changed costume: “Henri Bertrand to Caulaincourt, April 28, 1814,” Bertrand, Lettres à Fanny, 432; Waldbourg-Truchsess, Nouvelle relation, 32. Talk of Napoleon’s disguise had already made it to London via French newspapers by that May: see “French Papers,” Times (London), May 11, 1814.
“Paulette,” as he preferred: Fraser, Pauline Bonaparte, 205; Branda, La guerre secrète, 53.
With the close of the war: Aside from Ussher’s letters in Napoleon Banished, much useful information on Ussher and the Undaunted can be found in Byrne’s massive Naval Biographical Dictionary. See also MacKenzie, The Escape from Elba, 61–62. Ussher had come in to port a few days earlier, just as bulletins detailing Napoleon’s fall reached Marseille. From the deck of the Undaunted he had seen the white flag of surrender raised in port and pushed in to anchor. This spooked some French battery gunners into firing on the ship, leading Ussher to open his broadside. After ten minutes of fire, the battery was silenced and people gathered on the ramparts to wave white handkerchiefs. On his disembarking, men carried Ussher on their shoulders to the town hall to be hailed with eloquent speeches and toasts; at least this was how he reported the event in a letter to a young woman, a certain Mrs. M., back in England, adding that various ladies begged to shake his hand and he was “almost suffocated with kisses.” He told his Mrs. M. that he saw “thousands of women with their hands clasped and extended to Heaven, bewailing the loss of husbands, brothers, sons, but partaking in the general joy of deliverance from a tyranny that cannot be conceived much less described.” According to Napoleon’s later recollections, couriers from Marseille reached him a short while later with reports that corroborated those of Ussher, saying that the British had entered the city in triumph and people had trampled the tricolor and shattered a statue of the emperor. Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 7–9; Napoleon, Correspondance, XXXI, 6.
“It has fallen”: Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 7.
The arrangement satisfied: An Austrian aide-de-camp, Count Heinrich Karl von Clam-Martinic, described the dinner in a letter to Prince Schwarzenberg the next day. “It would be difficult to imagine two more opposite and contradictory facets in one person, as Napoleon showed in the performances he gave us on the 25th and yesterday,” he wrote. “In the first he hid in a lonely inn, pale and trembling, anxiously asking everyone’s advice . . . begging them to give the landlady no suspicion by their behavior that he was the Emperor, jumping at every footfall. To see him there, in the ruins of his lost empire, was enough to make one take him, without exaggeration, for a wretched cowardly usurper. But yesterday we saw him again as if he was weaving spells around us, inviting us to his table, expanding on the plans that would have made him master of Europe within two years . . . proving to the Russians that he had not been defeated by them but only by his own mistakes, and assuring us all that he had made France the first Power in the world.” We owe the discovery of this letter to the research of Munro Price and to Carl Philip Clam-Martinic, who shared unpublished family papers with Price. It is valuable not only in the information it provides but also for being a private correspondence that corroborates Waldbourg-Truchsess’s description of Napoleon’s fearfulness in his published memoir, which otherwise might have been dismissed as having been exaggerated for political purposes. Price, Napoleon, 248; Waldbourg-Truchsess, Nouvelle relation, 43–44.
“My health is good”: “Napoleon to Marie Louise, April 28, 1814,” Palmstierna, My Dearest Louise, 198–99.
“happy travels . . . insults”: “Henri to Fanny, April 28, 1814,” Bertrand, Lettres à Fanny, 431–32.
Under his command: Cole, Napoleon’s Egypt; Mitchell, Colonising Egypt; Reiss, The Black Count, 218–27.
Absence had been his ally: Napoleon, Correspondance, XXXI, 9. As Englund has written about Napoleon’s return from Egypt, “Bonaparte had left home famous; he returned more famous.” Englund, Napoleon, 152.
“His sword was . . . ‘Allons’”: Ussher Napoleon Banished, 10–11.
“his conscience . . . in Egypt”: Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 12.
Twenty-one guns saluted: “G. Peyrusse à son père (en mer et à l’île d’Elbe, 28 avril–2 mai 1814),” Peyrusse, Lettres, 201.
“bugles sounding, drums beating”: Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 11.
4: THIS NEW COUNTRY
From his leaking cabin: “G. Peyrusse à son père (en mer et à l’île d’Elbe, 28 avril–2 mai 1814),” Peyrusse, Lettres, 201–2; Peyrusse, Mémorial, 229.
Ussher had given: Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 12.
Out on the bridge: Campbell, Napoleon, 199; Ussher, Napoleon Banished, 12.
The ailments from wh
ich: I base my claim concerning Napoleon’s apparent happiness—with “apparent” being the key word—primarily on the firsthand accounts of Campbell, Peyrusse, and Ussher. There is, however, record of one dissenting British officer who refused to believe in the genuineness of Napoleon’s light mood, writing home to say that his fellow passenger “assumed an affability which certainly did not appear to be natural to him.” On Napoleon’s health: Baron Gourgaud on Saint Helena reported that Napoleon’s followers first noticed the signs of his failing health at Moscow in 1812, when his legs swelled. “My mind resists, but my body gives in,” he was heard muttering a few months earlier at Leipzig, the so-called “Battle of the Nations” that anticipated his final defeat and abdication. Price also notes the scholarship that suggests Napoleon may by then have been suffering from some kind of disorder of the pituitary gland, which might have affected his mental state as well. In 1815, John Cam Hobhouse wrote in his diary that he had heard directly from Neil Campbell that Napoleon had “a clap,” meaning gonorrhea, at the time of his trip to Elba and that Campbell seemed to indicate that he had seen Napoleon “inject,” assumedly as treatment for this purported malady. Regarding Napoleon’s list of complaints being relatively ordinary, see Bell, who writes that “few people reached their forties in the early nineteenth century without accumulating a colorful collection of chronic ailments and parasites.” Concerning Napoleon being a poor sailor, see Bell, Napoleon, 80–81; Cochran, Byron, Napoleon, 78; Gourgaud, Talks, 158; MacKenzie, The Escape from Elba, 62; Price, Napoleon, 9; Roberts, Napoleon, 166.
Campbell overheard some: Campbell, Napoleon, 199.