The Invisible Emperor Read online

  ALSO BY Mark Braude

  Making Monte Carlo: A History of Speculation and Spectacle

  PENGUIN PRESS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2018 by Mark Braude

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  The Invisible Emperor was supported in part by a generous Public Scholar Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in the book do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

  ISBN 9780735222601 (hardcover)

  ISBN 9780735222618 (ebook)

  Map illustrations by Jeffrey L. Ward

  While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Version_1

  FOR

  Eleanor and Jeremy

  Paradise is an island. So is hell.

  —JUDITH SCHALANSKY, Atlas of Remote Islands (2010)

  Lucky Napoleon! This is the most beautiful island. . . . There is no winter in Elba; cognac is threepence a large glass; the children have web feet; the women taste of salt. . . . The Island I love, and I wish I were not seeing it in one of the seasons of hell.

  —DYLAN THOMAS, postcards and letters from Elba (summer 1947)

  The Island of Elba, which a year ago was thought so disagreeable, is a paradise compared to Saint Helena.

  —NAPOLEON, on Saint Helena (February 1816)

  CONTENTS

  ALSO BY MARK BRAUDE

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  MAPS

  INTRODUCTION

  SPRING

  1: The Morning of the Poison Lump

  2: A Lodger in His Own Life

  3: Napoleon in Rags

  4: This New Country

  5: Gilded Keys

  6: Rough Music

  7: The Robinson Crusoe of Elba

  8: My Island Is Very Little

  9: Louis the Gouty and the Weathervane Man

  10: Pretty Valleys, Trees, Forest, and Water

  11: The Emperor Is Dead

  12: And Every Tuna Bows to Him

  13: A Death, a Treaty, and a Celebration

  14: A Ridiculous Noise

  SUMMER

  15: The More Unfavorably Does He Appear

  16: Ubicumque Felix Napoleon

  17: Sirocco

  18: Sultry Confinement

  19: The One-Eyed Count

  20: A Perfectly Bourgeois Simplicity

  21: Tall Fanny and the Two Empresses Bonaparte

  22: Taking the Cure

  23: Tourist Season

  24: The Politics of Forgetting

  FALL

  25: He Is Tolerably Happy

  26: The Vulgar Details of Married Lives

  27: Don Giovanni, Cinderella, and Undine

  28: I Think He Is Capable of Crossing Over

  29: The Oil Merchant and Other Visitors

  30: He Had Been Called Coward!

  WINTER

  31: A Last Goodbye

  32: The Sadness of My Retirement

  33: The (Near) Wreck of the Inconstant

  34: Bourbon Difficulties

  35: Nights at the Theater

  36: Pietro St. Ernest, Otherwise Known as Fleury du Chaboulon

  37: The Eagle Prepares for Flight

  38: The Oil Merchant Returns

  39: Campbell in Florence

  40: Mardi Gras

  41: Tower of Babel

  42: Everything Was Quiet at Elba

  43: Inconstant

  44: At Sea

  45: Campbell Lands at Elba

  46: Our Beautiful France

  47: The Partridge in Pursuit

  48: Golfe-Juan

  49: Most Reluctantly I Have Felt Called Upon to Mention It

  50: In an Iron Cage

  51: URGENT

  52: Laffrey

  53: To Contemplate All Objects at a Certain Angle

  Epilogue: Napoleon, Marie Louise, Campbell, and Elba

  Postscript

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  IT ALL FELL APART quite quickly. From the towers of Notre-Dame and some of the higher rooftops, people watched through telescopes as invaders breached the outskirts of Paris on the night of March 29, 1814. Cossacks crouched round their campfires atop Montmartre, the sounds of their eerie music drifting down into the village below. They were toasting the death of the miller of the Moulin de la Galette, whose ravaged body was tied to one of the mill’s sails, or so went the rumor.

  Parisians had good cause to be terrified just then. Fearing the populace’s revolutionary potential as much as any foreign force, French officials decided against distributing arms en masse, even after troops failed to hold the enemy beyond the gates. This left the city’s defense to the twelve thousand members of the Paris National Guard, facing a force nearly ten times larger.

  Though the result would have been obvious to everyone going in, the spectacle was played out just the same. A British artist who lived in Paris, Thomas Underwood, recalled passing that bright spring day among “fashionable loungers of both sexes” at a popular café on the boulevard des Italiens, “sitting, as usual, on the chairs placed there and appearing almost uninterested spectators of the number of wounded French and prisoners of the allies which were brought in.” Each side suffered roughly nine thousand casualties, making this the deadliest battle of 1814.

  Napoleon’s subjects wouldn’t soon forget his failure to appear in the capital alongside his generals. After a year and a half of fighting across much of Europe, an allied coalition led by Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia had driven French soldiers out of German territory and crossed into France. Instead of falling back to Paris, the obvious target, Napoleon had opted to dig in by the Aube River about a hundred miles east of the city, thinking he could cleave the attacking forces in two and defeat each half in succession. This had freed other allied troops to reach Paris largely unchecked.

  Allied and French representatives had been trying to arrange Napoleon’s surrender for months. Joseph Bonaparte warned his brother that people would turn against him as soon as they realized he preferred prolonging war to making “even a disadvantageous peace.” But aside from a few brief moments of armistice, Napoleon had kept fighting, forever seeking the one dramatic victory that would allow him to negotiate from a position of strength. Having risen from artillery officer to general to First Consul to Emperor of the French on the promise of constant and glorious triumph, he feared he wou
ld be overthrown at the first sign that he was even considering bending to an opponent’s demands.

  Napoleon had ridden for Paris as soon as he realized his mistake, switching out his exhausted horses for fresh ones borrowed along the way at intervals. But by the time he reached a posthouse just south of the city, around midnight on March 30, he was too late; a column of French cavalry had already arrived with news of the capitulation signed hours earlier by representatives of his trusted general and confidant, Marshal Marmont.

  Realizing they could avoid a wider massacre by surrendering, Parisians had rushed into the streets to welcome the occupying soldiers with shouts of “Down with the Emperor!” and “Death to the Corsican!” Imperial eagles and N’s gave way to fleurs-de-lys, the stylized lilies of monarchy. People waved handkerchiefs of white, the traditional color of the Bourbon dynasty that had once ruled France. They brought down the statue of a laurel-crowned Napoleon that had topped the Colonne de la Grande Armée in the Place Vendôme, built from melted-down cannons seized in the battle of Austerlitz, his gift to the city he had promised to make the most beautiful that ever existed.

  After a short sulk by the side of the road, Napoleon retreated to the castle complex of Fontainebleau, nearly forty miles to the southeast, sending his aide-de-camp Armand de Caulaincourt to negotiate in Paris on his behalf.

  At Fontainebleau, surrounded by his marshals, with soldiers bivouacked on the lawn and injured men recuperating in the outbuildings, he spoke of launching a counterattack on the occupied capital. He had about forty-five thousand troops at his disposal. But while his harangues drew cheers from the members of his Guard, beyond the castle confines such talk would have been dismissed as madness. Every village and town in Europe had been marked by the two decades of nearly perpetual war, with estimates of the death toll in the major conflicts since 1803 ranging from one to six million. Most of these deaths came not in the quick of battle but from festering wounds, or from dysentery, or from frost, or from being marched past the point of exhaustion. It was common to see mental patients forced out of asylums to free up space for incoming injured men.

  “Nothing but abdication can save us!” said the esteemed Marshal Ney, not quite to Napoleon’s face but loud enough for him to hear. And then he made a joke with ominous undertones, telling Napoleon he had no reason to worry since nobody wanted “to act out a scene from Saint Petersburg,” a reference to the assassination of Tsar Paul I masterminded by two of his generals.

  Napoleon began drafting the document of his abdication. At its height, his empire had spanned half the European continent and beyond. He had directly or indirectly governed the lives of some eighty million people. Soon he would be sent to a place with less than a hundred square miles of territory and a population of just over twelve thousand.

  * * *

  • • •

  NAPOLEON’S POWER had rested largely on his ability to tell a compelling story, both about himself and about the historical significance of his rule. “What a novel my life has been!” he supposedly said, looking back on his accomplishments. The Napoleonic novel promised all those who consumed it that they were participating in a glorious adventure simply by doing so. Napoleon and his supporters crafted this seductive lie through images as well as words. Their story depended on the right costuming (the famous hat, the hand in the greatcoat), the right heraldry, the right painting, the right sculpture and architecture. It depended on grandiose ceremonies and lavish processions. But while Napoleon presented himself as a sight to behold, the living embodiment of some abstract notion of greatness, the viewing was always meant to be done from a distance.

  Which is what made the Elban exile such an unusual moment in this most unusual life. On Elba, Napoleon was seen by more people at closer range than at any other point in his career. Stripped of his wealth, abandoned by most of his family and all but a few members of his coterie, he was made to interact daily with men and women from different social stations. One afternoon might find him sharing a meal of hard-boiled eggs and crusty bread with the laborers preparing his hilltop villa for a much-delayed visit from his wife and child; another might find him serving as a kind of tourist attraction for a humble copper-master from Wales who showed up unannounced asking to see the Emperor of Elba and was granted an hours-long interview with the man who only a few months earlier had wielded more power than anyone on the planet.

  What follows is the story of Napoleon’s disappearance from the main stage of global power in the spring of 1814 and his reappearance the following winter, when he and a few hundred followers landed on a beach in southern France to begin their ultimately disastrous march on Paris. But rather than focusing on how Napoleon was rendered invisible during the ten months separating those two points, this history instead traces how people started to see him in new ways during that same stretch of time, precisely because he’d been banished to such a seemingly remote place and into unprecedented intimacy with others.

  SPRING

  { 1 }

  THE MORNING OF THE POISON LUMP

  THROUGH THE THIN WALL of the closet he lately called his bedroom, the valet Pelard heard liquid being poured into a glass, and then a gulp followed by a long silence, and he knew the emperor had poisoned himself. Another attendant had hidden his pistols, but this had been insufficient precaution. Only its creator, the physician Yvan, knew of the poisonous concoction of opium, belladonna, and white hellebore stashed in the silken bag Napoleon had taken to carrying around his neck ever since the Moscow campaign two years earlier.

  Now the chamberlains were shouting for the same Yvan. It was three in the morning, April 13, 1814, in the royal bedchamber of the sprawling castle complex at Fontainebleau, two days’ hard ride south from Paris. Napoleon was forty-four, and had a wife, an ex-wife, a mistress, two stepchildren, and two young sons, one legitimate and one not.

  In his fever he spoke several names: his betrayers. He called for the red morocco portfolio that held letters from his wife, Marie Louise, so it could be given to their son, Napoleon, the King of Rome.

  Yvan ordered hot drinks to be brewed, administered cold compresses, and made the patient swallow vomit-inducing ashes from the fire. By sunrise the doctor had confirmed his initial suspicion that two years and its dilution in water had drained the poison lump of any real potency. Still, the task riled him, and as soon as it was completed he collapsed into a chair and had a delirious laughing fit, after which he ran outside, grabbed the first horse he could find, and rode off, leaving his hat behind in the mud.

  Napoleon was left to sleep for a few more hours. Later he rose and signed the final document of his abdication:

  The allied Powers having declared that the Emperor Napoleon is the sole obstacle to the restoration of peace in Europe, the Emperor Napoleon, faithful to his coronation oath, declares that he renounces for himself and his successors the thrones of France and Italy, and that there is no personal sacrifice, even that of his life, which he is not prepared to make in the interests of France.

  In Paris, people were meanwhile reading copies of a declaration signed in the name of the Russian tsar, Alexander, though actually penned by Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Napoleon’s former foreign minister and now the chief diplomat guiding the French surrender. The declaration stressed that while the allied sovereigns no longer recognized Napoleon’s rule, they pledged to “respect the integrity of ancient France as it existed under its legitimate Kings” and that people should consider themselves under Alexander’s personal protection until a provisional French government could be established.

  Talleyrand—brilliant, elegant, reptilian—had invited Alexander to stay at his town house at the corner of rue de Saint-Florentin and the bustling rue de Rivoli, one of Napoleon’s few great achievements in urban planning, meant as a modern triumphal way and named for his fame-making victory in his First Italian Campaign. Talleyrand and Alexander had been colluding since 1807, after Talleyrand res
igned as Napoleon’s foreign minister to protest his policies, though staying within the imperial fold as vice–grand elector, prompting the joke that this was the only “vice” he didn’t yet possess. While Napoleon dismissed the higher-born Talleyrand as no more than “shit in a silk stocking,” he valued his counsel and Talleyrand remained privy to military and diplomatic intelligence, much of which he passed on to the Russians and later to the Austrians. Though he was compensated for doing so, Talleyrand seems to have been largely driven by the belief that he was saving the French people from their once promising but now disastrous ruler and that an alliance with Alexander offered the best chance for a lasting peace. This was the man who was famously quoted as defining treason as “only a matter of dates.”

  Talleyrand gently helped convince Alexander and the other allied sovereigns and ministers that France should be ruled by a member of the Bourbon dynasty: the Count of Provence, Louis Stanislas Xavier, younger brother of the guillotined Louis XVI, who would return from exile to lead a constitutional monarchy as Louis XVIII. Talleyrand predicted that the French Senate, stocked with his cronies, would grant institutional legitimacy to a Bourbon monarchy and that Louis, “having always had more liberal ideas and having lived in England, would return with the desired opinions.”

  People knew little about the exiled Louis aside from his famous name, and no one under the age of twenty-one had known a France that included a Bourbon. Yet his appeal was clear. He offered a living link in a dynastic chain that led back to the sixteenth-century grandeur of Henri IV and further to the very roots of the Capetian dynasty that had been established before the turn of the millennium. A Bourbon on the throne promised not only a definitive end to the Napoleonic age, but a return to order—just as Napoleon in coming to power as First Consul had declared the French Revolution and with it years of civil strife to be finally at an end.