Authors: Patrick Rambaud
‘Do you hear that?’
‘The mistral, sire.’
‘No! Voices, creaking, wheels. It’s an ambush. They’re going to kill me, I tell you!’
‘I’ll go and look.’
Standing by one of the windows overlooking the courtyard, Octave realized the peasants of the region were assembling in large numbers outside, with entire families sitting in carts. The Emperor gave a start at the slightest sound, but it was quite possible that he was not mistaken; after all, the convoy had been stoned at Lambesc; by Saint-Canat, not one berlin had a single window left intact, and two postilions had been wounded. Octave returned to the table.
‘The road is blocked by people from the hamlets and the neighbouring farms...’
‘Let’s wait for nightfall,’ said Bertrand, ‘until they’ve gone.’
‘And what if they attack?’ asked the Emperor. ‘Could I get out through that window at the back?’
Octave examined the window in question, which turned out to have a grille over it. Meanwhile Campbell tried to reassure the trembling exile.
‘They’re just curious.’
‘They’re furious, is what they are, not curious!’
The Emperor was prevailed upon to drink a glass of Chambertin, half of which he spilled over his waistcoat. He refused to taste the capons and the chickens when they were finally cooked, and shivered intermittently as though electricity were passing through his body.
‘I want to leave before they hang me!’
‘Let’s wait for nightfall,’ repeated Campbell.
‘But didn’t you see that scarecrow effigy of me this morning, hanging from a tree?’
‘We’ll surround you, sire,’ said Bertrand to calm him.
‘You haven’t even got any guns!’
‘These people will go, Sire, they aren’t going to put you under siege ...’
‘How do you know that? When they’ve had enough of standing waiting in the wind, they’ll come back
en masse
to the inn, and they’ll run one of those spits through my belly!’
Napoleon pointed towards the spits in the fireplace, which gleamed with stock and chicken juice.
*
As soon as he had the opportunity, Octave took out his notebook and pencilled some notes about what he had just experienced. Later he would flesh out the rather dry information, which he saw as an aide-mémoire. From being a subaltern, who would never play the most important role in the team, he would become a witness. Thus, under the date of Tuesday 26 April, he wrote the following: ‘
Because of the peasants who had us trapped in the inn of La Calade, we had to wait for nightfall before we could set off again. The postilions, some of them armed with loaded pistols, slept in the stable to watch over the horses, encircling the berlins, which were subjected to no further damage. The people just wanted to see His Majesty, out of curiosity, according to Campbell, or to insult him, because I clearly made out some cries of ‘Down with Corsica!’ After the meal, which he did not touch, suspecting that he was being poisoned with arsenic, the Emperor called for a room. There was one, low-ceilinged and not very clean, which was enough for him. Once his injection had been administered, he went to sleep sitting on the straw mattress, which was crawling with insects, his head leaning against my shoulder. I know he had nightmares, and his sudden starts and the inaudible phrases he muttered woke me several times. The foreign commissioners shook us awake at about three o’clock in the morning to tell us that the road was free and the carriages were ready. We would be passing through Aix before dawn. The authorities had taken the precaution of locking the gates to keep the armed mob from running into the road and attacking us. The Sub-prefect, a messenger told us, was walking to join our cortège and offer us a squadron of police. His Majesty gave the unfortunate Loisellier back his uniform, thanking him for his help and the risks he had taken, and, in response to an idea of Campbell’s, the messenger was kitted out more nobly, although rather strangely, with a white Austrian tunic, a Prussian cap and the pale grey coat of the Russian officers. A foreign major took his place next to Bertrand in the sleeper. We avoided Aix, which was in turmoil, but heard a great hubbub behind the ramparts. At La Grande Pagère we lunched with the Sub-prefect, whose policemen helped us to pass through Saint-Maximin, Brignoles and Tourves by first light. . .’
Once they had passed through those towns, they felt they had reached safety. Imposing Austrian garrisons had been set up throughout the region, and troops were spread over tens of kilometres all the way to the coast. At Le Luc de Provence, where the carriages appeared in the middle of the afternoon, some hussars from Lichtenstein had erected their tents in a park. The park faced the chateâu of Bouillidou - the home of the former Deputy Charles - where Napoleon found Pauline, his favourite sister. She was supposed to have gone to a spa in the Basses-Alpes but, having been alerted to the Emperor’s impending arrival, she had chosen to wait in this country mansion.
A severe figure in a cassimere coat with a v-neck (in line with the latest Parisian fashion) opened the door as Napoleon approached: Montbreton, a highly professional equerry and chamberlain, dealt with everything, sorted out all kinds of problems, issued advice and generally made Pauline’s life easier.
‘The Princess?’ Napoleon asked.
‘I will take you to her room, Sire.’
‘Is she still unwell? Be frank, Montbreton.’
‘She’s hot, she’s cold, she has vapours, she sweats, either she eats nothing at all or else she eats too much ...’
‘Oh, Paoletta! She just needs to be taken dancing or introduced to a nicely turned aide-de-camp! Tell me, Montbreton, how do you find me?’
‘In perfect health, sire.’
‘I mean: what do you think of my new style?’
The Emperor opened his coat as he walked, revealing his composite uniform, over which the chamberlain cast an expert eye.
‘The chasseur’s uniform suited Your Majesty ... in a different way.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘I certainly do.’
‘It would have been too conspicuous, and I have just travelled through a land of murderers!’
In the corridor Napoleon removed his Prussian cap and held it out to Bertrand, before handing his Russian coat to Octave. Together the three men entered a darkened room, the walls striped with sunlight that passed through the slats of the closed shutters. Two servants ran lit candles back and forth along the door and window frames to find the draughts that Pauline could not bear, while she lay on a swan-shaped sofa, rolled up in a priceless cashmir from Leroy in the rue Mandar, her feet wrapped in a blouse that belonged to an ample-bosomed lady’s maid. She turned her head. She had the straight nose of the Bonapartes, long eyelashes and luscious lips. Bertrand thought she looked unusually thin, but Octave felt a sudden flood of warmth pass through him; red as a crayfish, he studied the Borghese princess, all of a sudden scornful of his rustic amours.
‘Nabulione!’ exclaimed the goddess, rising to her feet.
She spread her arms, her cashmir fell, and she was cold no more. Octave saw her round shoulders and her legs showing below her fashionable Venus tunic. She had long, firm muscles, tender, warm, the colour of ivory. Her movements were languid, but her nerves were clearly on edge, and she was more savage than princess. The candlelight played on the coils of her dark hair as brother and sister hugged one another to the point of suffocation, he laughing, she weeping.
‘Nabulione, why, tell me why you abdicated!’
‘The legitimacy of the Bourbons, Paoletta, is formidably powerful...’
‘But!’
Pauline had pressed her cheek to the Emperor’s Austrian jacket, and now she pushed him away with both hands, rolling her black eyes.
‘What is this uniform?’
‘I’d be dead without it.’
‘Take it off! Take it off or I’ll never speak to you again! Take it off immediately!’
‘Monsieur Sénécal, rather than standing there gawping at us like an idiot, get me a uniform of the chasseurs of the Guard.’
In his ordinary uniform once again, the Emperor closed himself away with Pauline until evening. In the meantime, his retinue and his commissioners prepared for the night ahead, a proper, peaceful night in real sheets - and about time too - but late that same day an anxious chamberlain appeared, informing Bertrand in a quavering voice: ‘Your master is exposing himself to danger, your grace.’
‘I’ll deal with it, Montbreton.’
Napoleon was standing on a terrace surrounded by honeysuckle, facing a crowd. The locals were grumbling, and one excitable voice demanded, ‘Where is the wretch?’
‘Here I am!’ replied the Emperor, towering over the scene.
‘So you’re the monster?’ a market gardener asked.
‘Do you doubt it?’
Napoleon threw down a coin bearing his effigy, which was picked up by an urchin. Everyone wanted to compare the profile engraved upon it with the fat man above them. A good few people had their doubts - the real one wasn’t so puffy, he had a thicker curl on his forehead, a more noble air - until an old man with grey whiskers raised his cocked hat and called in a stentorian voice: ‘I saw you at Marengo, my Emperor! I was a dragoon under Kellermann! And under Bessières at Wagram. We shot hares in the burning corn! A bullet in my left calf, a bayonet in my right thigh! Cuts everywhere! Lost an eye at the Moskva, but I can see you with the other!’
The Emperor chose to address only this heaven-sent old soldier, although as he talked to him of glory, his words spoke also to the crowd. He was busy winning his audience over when Bertrand tugged him by the sleeve. He groaned.
‘You exasperate me, Bertrand! They were about to shout ‘
Vive l’Empereur!"’
*
‘
Wednesday 27. Since Princess Pauline (who is even more beautiful than the very beautiful Duchess of Bassano), since Princess Pauline, as I was saying, has promised the Emperor she’ll come to the island of Elba, he has been acting up. We parted ways before St Tropez, where we waited for the other berlins in the convoy, along with little General Drouot and the vans that had arrived safely from Fontainebleau. And we didn’t stop at Saint Raphaël, that fishing port where His Majesty had once landed on his way back from Egypt, and where some ships awaited him for a crossing of a different kind, but at Fréjus, ‘the home of Tacitus", he said. At the inn of the Red Hat, Bertrand announced the visit of an Englishman whom Campbell wished to introduce to him. This Captain Thomas Ussher commanded a frigate, the
Undaunted.
The Emperor stood there with a book in his hand as they talked about the island of Elba, and how the Spanish had once fortified it against the Ottoman corsairs. His Majesty was to board the brig
Inconstant,
but, inspired by Campbell, he preferred to go to sea in the
Undaunted.
Captain Usshers frigate was better equipped and faster, it had special comforts and, more particularly, the Emperor felt safer under an English flag than on a boat that had formerly been controlled by the King of France.’
In almost overloaded boats, the sailors of the
Undaunted
ferried the various bits of luggage, statues and crates from the vans and the berlins to the ship, and hoisted them on board the frigate with thick ropes. The departure was scheduled for the following day, Thursday, with no time yet specified - but in the middle of the night Captain Ussher ran down to the apartment in the Red Hat where Napoleon was staying. Octave, who was sleeping outside the bedroom door on Roustan’s old trestle bed, woke violently and was astonished at what he heard.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly five in the morning, monsieur, the Emperor will have to get ready, we have to weigh anchor.’
‘So early?’
‘The wind is falling and that worries me. The commissioners of the allied powers don’t want us to spend whole days lying at anchor.’
‘Count Bertrand has ordered carriages for seven o’clock ...’
‘Wake up your butler now, sir, if you will!’
‘What’s all this racket?’ croaked a voice behind the bedroom door, which opened to reveal the Emperor in a nightshirt, with tired eyes and a grumpy expression.
Ussher was not giving the real reason for his zeal. Campbell, in fact, had received some information: soldiers dismissed from the Italian army were returning to France, shouting,
‘Vive I’Empereur!’
There was no time to lose. Those troublemakers could turn away from the coast and prevent or hinder the departure of the
Undaunted
; Ussher was nervous and Napoleon was apathetic.
‘It’s because of the wind, sire,’ explained Octave.
‘The wind?’
‘It could change,’ said the captain.
‘Let it change. That’s the wind’s job.’
‘My frigate asks only to get under way, Sire.’
‘And I, captain, ask only to rest, I feel queasy, I have a bad stomach and a sore leg, I’m about to go down with something, it must be that lobster I ate . . .’
Napoleon took his time; Octave helped Hubert the valet to perform the ritual of the Emperor’s toilet, and once he was shaved and dressed he began walking meditatively around the room. Angry sounds rose from the street, and he raised an eyebrow.
‘The French populace is the worst in the world,’ observed the Englishman.
‘They’re fickle.’
‘They don’t look particularly aggressive to me,’ remarked Octave, who was watching them from the open window.
‘That’s exactly what I mean, they’re fickle! In the evening they want to hang me, in the morning they adore me.’
Bertrand came to announce that the carriages had arrived. Napoleon picked up his sword, which was lying on a table, and slipped it into his belt.
‘Let’s go,’ he said.
The captain checked that his own sword was moving properly in its scabbard, so he could draw it in case of trouble, but the moment the Emperor appeared in the doorway of the inn, the crowd that had gathered fell silent. Respectable bourgeois, ladies in all their finery. These provincials felt they were taking part in a historical event that they would tell their friends and children about for years to come. They parted before the Emperor, who, noticing a pretty girl, asked, ‘Are you married? Do you have children?’