Napoleon's Exile (14 page)

‘Fetch me some paper.'

Octave headed to the antechamber. Paper? Where on earth from? He bumped into one of the aides-de-camp, who directed him, voice thick with sleep, towards the desk in the adjacent study, where the writing-case was kept. Octave took out a bundle of papers and returned to the bedroom: Napoleon was sitting on a loveseat, near the chimney where sparks licked at the wood. Octave laid down the sheets and writing materials, but the Emperor was staring into the distance. Octave dawdled, hoping for an instruction that never came, then glanced around to check that everything was in order, but no, Monsieur Hubert, who had been on duty before him, had forgotten to put the sugar-bowl on the chest of drawers beside the jug of water. Octave said nothing, but just backed slowly out of the room and returned to his antechamber, but he did not close the door completely, so that he could watch the Emperor through the chink.

Lit by the fire, which cast a giant, trembling shadow on the wall behind him, Napoleon dipped a pen into his crystal inkpot; he frantically scratched the paper, then tore up the page, crumpled the pieces and threw them into the fire; he started over again, and again he burned the results - and did so a third time before rising to his feet with a wheeze. Octave could no longer see him, but he could hear him, because the floor creaked and the footsteps came heavy and slow. Then came the sound of running water; he must have been filling a glass. There was also a more metallic sound, the little spoon stirring sugar. What sugar?

Octave was beginning to worry when the bedroom door opened abruptly and the Emperor appeared in the gloomy doorway. The untied belt of his dressing-gown hung like a rope, his body was gripped with spasms, and he clutched his stomach with one hand and the door frame with the other. His face was distorted into a grimace. He managed to issue an order between the violent hiccups that shook his body.

‘Call the Duke of Vicenza and the Duke of Bassano . . .'

‘Sire! First I will help you to sit down,' stammered Octave.

‘Call them! Call the Duke of Vicenza...' Napoleon insisted, leaning against the door as though he were about to slide and fall into a heap.

‘Gentlemen!' cried Octave, panic-stricken, shaking awake the other valets and waking the guard officers slumped on the uncomfortable sofas in the drawing rooms. They jumped to their feet, grew agitated, and finally worked out what was going on. Soon the interminable corridors were filled with people, and candles were being lit all over the palace. Some of the servants dashed to the chancellery where Bassano was staying, while others went in search of Caulaincourt and Dr Yvan. Marshal Bertrand had been roused from sleep, and was hastily getting dressed. Everyone was unkempt, some had managed to put on waistcoats, most barely had time to slip on their shoes or plonk their wigs on their heads. Octave stayed by the Emperor. Constant came running at the sound of all the activity. He made some tea to calm his master, who had dropped into his armchair, downcast for a moment, then nervous again, tense and panting.

When Caulaincourt arrived, he turned away the younger palace attendants, who were groaning or sobbing more or less sincerely. News spread and distorted; they were already burying the Emperor.

‘Quickly,' said Octave. ‘He's calling for you.'

‘What's wrong with him?'

‘Nausea, shivering, when I helped him to the armchair (God, but he was heavy!) I felt his freezing hands, his dry skin, he's unsteady, he's green in the face ...'

Caulaincourt looked at Napoleon. The Emperor was tormented by hiccups, his lips were flecked with foam. Constant tried to make him swallow a few mouthfuls of tea, but he spat it all over himself.

‘A vase!'

Octave caught sight of a piece of Dresden china and handed it to Caulaincourt, who placed it beneath His Majesty's mouth. Napoleon began to vomit a disgusting grey liquid; calming down, he looked up at the Duke and said with a sigh, ‘Your grace . . .'

‘Sire, I'm here.'

‘I've poisoned myself.'

‘Have you called Dr Yvan?' Caulaincourt asked Octave, who was holding the revolting vase and didn't know where to empty it.

‘Right away, your grace.'

In came the doctor, along with Bassano, who had just finished knotting his tie.

‘He tried to poison himself,' Caulaincourt explained.

‘I see!' exclaimed the doctor wearily, with a hint of anger.

Yvan immediately checked the glass that the Emperor had used; there on the silver-gilt tray he discovered the empty capsule in which the pharmacist had prepared, on his orders, the same poison that the Emperor had, in Russia, worn around his neck in a black satin heart. Napoleon grumbled: ‘You miscalculated the dose, Yvan ...'

The horrified doctor felt the Emperor's pulse.

‘Sire, when you want to kill yourself you're better off picking up a pistol, and then you're sure to get the dose right.'

‘Give me something stronger.'.

Yvan did not reply, but congratulated Constant on his initiative: ‘Now that he's back from the dead, give the patient some hot tea to wash out his stomach, and let him rest.' With that, Yvan turned on his heels, forgetting his hat, and parted the groups of servants clustered in the corridors and antechambers. He answered questions with only a single sentence: ‘It's all an act, that's all it is, an act!'

Meanwhile Octave had passed the vase to a clerk, and opened wide a window. Caulaincourt and Bassano dragged the Emperor over so that he could breathe in the cool night air, which revived him a little. In the courtyard, Dr Yvan untethered a horse, jumped into the saddle and set off at a great gallop.

‘How difficult it is to die in one's bed,' said the Emperor, his face pallid. ‘When so little separates life from war ...'

‘Sire,' asked Bassano, ‘why did you take the poison?'

‘I'm going to throw up again.'

Another vase was spoiled before the Emperor explained that he found any other kind of death repugant, it left traces of blood, it left marks on the face. He was sure that his body would be displayed after his death, and he wanted the soldiers to recognize his face smooth and calm, as they had seen it a thousand times in battle.

It was dawn. Wrapped in his dressing-gown, the Emperor sat in an armchair by the now extinguished fire, his head in his hands, his legs bare, his feet in his worn slippers. He didn't move. Caulaincourt ventured to remind him that he still had to sign the ratifications of the treaty demanded by the allies, which Macdonald would take to Paris. And so it was that Napoleon signed, without rereading it, the long text that would keep him far from France on an island, a tiny island, which smelled of rosemary - but which was really a cage.

‘A man has no calling; he has no more duty or vocation than a plant or an animal.’

Stirner,
The Ego and His Own

T
HE
E
MPEROR WAS
resigned. After a day on a light diet, entrusting Bassano and Caulaincourt with the task of arranging the stages of his journey, he took refuge in books. Shutting himself away in his study, which he now hardly ever left, he organized the pillage of the palace library, drawing up a list of the authors to be taken into exile: Cervantes, Fénélon, La Fontaine, Voltaire, his dear Plutarch in the translation by Jacques Amyot, a collection of the
Moniteur universel.
The Emperor browsed, consulted, marked pages, sorted through the volumes that were to be put in the cases - and, because the regular librarians of Fontainebleau had fled and because he was well-read, Octave was appointed to assist Count Bertrand in this diverting task. If Napoleon went on unfolding maps, he no longer did so to plan his army’s retreat, but to study geographical landmarks. He looked up and asked, ‘Do you know this island, gentlemen? Does it have a palace? A castle? A suitable dwelling-place? A reasonable one?’

‘We just know where it is, sire.’

‘Show me, Bertrand, I can’t find it...’

‘Here ...’

Count Bertrand pointed with his fingernail to a forlorn little dot in the sea next to Corsica.

‘It looks like a greenfly.’

‘It’s the island of Elba.’

‘That’s supposed to be an island? That’s a rock.’

Napoleon pouted, peering through his lorgnette at the map of the Mediterranean.

‘The coast doesn’t seem far away,’ he said.

‘Piombino is about three or four leagues from Elba. Look, sire ...’

‘I can see the shores of Tuscany. The Tuscans can’t stand me, they’re still in mourning for their Grand Duke Leopold. They live in a garden, but I know they are hostile to me.’

‘They are as cowardly as they are rebellious, Your Majesty has nothing to fear.’

‘Ha! My kingdom isn’t all that far from Rome ...’

‘Forty-five leagues away, in fact, and Naples eighty-five.’

‘That opens up some prospects ...’

The Emperor was smiling, and nibbling dreamily at the handle of his pince-nez. He clapped his hands when Octave handed him a booklet he had just dug out from the bottom of a drawer,
Notice on the Island of Elba,
by an anonymous author, and, more importantly, Arsène Thé- baut’s larger and more recent
Journey to the Island of Elba.
'Right, then!’ he said. ‘Let’s learn about our kingdom!’

He read until evening, sometimes meditating out loud: ‘These stout fellows, sailors and fishermen, have rather coarse manners . . .’or: ‘If the hares eat all those aromatic herbs in the scrub, they must taste extraordinary in a fricassée, don’t you think, gentlemen? Let’s get going! This little island doesn’t sound all that bad ... It even has unexploited goldmines.’ Nothing that he learned from Paris held his imagination now: it mattered little to him that royalists had put the statue of Henri IV back on the Pont-Neuf; in his mind’s eye he was wandering among the juniper bushes and fig-trees that grew twisted among the rocks of Elba. He had already left.

His regrets now became more historical and distant in tone, he spoke of the Etruscans who had exploited the island of Elba, flushed from the
Aeneid
300 warriors who had come from the island to disembark with Aeneas on Ausonia’s shores: ‘Both iron and soldiers Elba did supply,’ Virgil sang. ‘Nonetheless,’ Napoleon added quietly, with a frown, ‘when Diocletian abdicates to retire to his villa in Savona, he is returning to the Dalmatia of his birth, and by then he is sixty years old, and power has exhausted him. All the same!’ he continued. ‘I’m fifteen years younger than that, and it isn’t power that exhausts me. What I lack is men.’

Once again Octave changed clothes without changing his role. As he was unattached, Bassano had easily persuaded him to pursue his surveillance work close to the Emperor. Octave would follow him to the island of Elba. In the phoney court that would be set up there, he would protect Napoleon against his enemies, whether paid or fanatical. Besides, by visiting shoemaker Boiron, as he had done several times in search of information, Octave had learned that Maubreuil was assembling a team of paid thugs, and was planning to launch an ambush in the forest when the procession left the castle and took the road into exile; chasseurs of the Guard would therefore escort His Majesty at least as far as Briare, the first expected stopping-point. Boiron had also given Octave a parcel of the belongings he had left at the rue Saint-Sauveur, which the royalists had managed to pass on to him. As well as his favourite cane, which he had left behind at Sémallé's, Octave recognized his blue suit and his wide-brimmed hat. Octave wanted to pay the shoemaker for his new boots, which could have been made to measure for him. So it was in civilian dress that, on the night of 19 April, he checked the loading of the 100 vans which would travel ahead of the Imperial carriage - because this wasn’t a hasty escape, but a noble departure planned out in the minutest detail; His Majesty would want for nothing.

Preparations went on for hours. The open coaches were lined up in the palace courtyard, by the bright light of the torchères and the coachmen’s lanterns. The servants, and some grenadiers who had been called in as reinforcements, loaded the numbered boxes according to their content. The Emperor’s personal silver took up little room compared to the military munitions, wrapped statues, furniture, bronzes, paintings large and small, and the books designed to render the unknown dwelling on the island of Elba inhabitable.

‘Take care with that, damn you!’ cried Octave, raising his cane like a sergeant major.

‘Me?’ asked a dazed groom, who was tangled up with a peculiarly shaped package swaddled in coarse cloth. He was having trouble holding it in his arms.

‘It’s a Cupidon!’

‘I swear I’ve done nothing . . .’

‘That statue, there - you nearly broke the bow it’s holding! It’s fragile!’

‘What’s going on?’

Count Bertrand had turned his head at the sound of the altercation, interrupting the advice he was giving the Polish officers who would be acting as guides and protection for the convoy. The groom put his burden down on the cobbles, nearly knocked over the Cupidon again, and explained to Bertrand: ‘It’s the Pubidon, Chief Marshal.’

‘The what?’

‘The Cupidon from the green salon,’ said Octave, ‘whose bow could have been broken by such rough treatment!’

The groom didn’t understand a word, but picked up the trussed object again and carried it like a sacrament to the designated van. There, valets crammed the statue in between a bust of Socrates (whose beard poked from a sack) and a marble-eyed Venus. There was no real accident of any kind, however, and even the silver-gilt plates were intact as they faced the jolts of the journey. Soon the coaches were covered with tarpaulins; they passed through the castle gates just before midnight. Octave and Bertrand nostalgically considered the interminable procession as the vehicles disappeared into the Fontainebleau night.

‘Don’t you think there’s something funereal about the echoes of the wheels and hoofs?’

‘I was about to say just that, your grace, but look over there ...’