Authors: Patrick Rambaud
Clearly and bluntly, Octave gave an account of the fits of fury he had witnessed. When, for example, the Emperor learned that the King of France had just issued naturalisation papers to Masséna, because he was born in Nice on Italian territory, the Emperor was livid: ‘These people have lost their minds! After all the Battle of Zurich and the defence of Genoa didn’t naturalize the Prince of Essling!’
Or else it was Princess Pauline who infuriated her brother. She thought she was doing the right thing in asking His Majesty’s bookseller in Livorno to change his bindings to make his library prettier. She thought, but she thought wrong, and Napoleon was so displeased that he called his guards and had them use their bayonets to rip to shreds some thirty geographical and medical textbooks before his very eyes.
‘The Emperor’s life is shrinking
', Octave recorded, ‘
and as the assassination threats accumulate he barely leaves the Mulini Palace, where he lives a cloistered life. His mood sours over the merest trifles.’
This dismal climate did not prevent balls and receptions, however, which were to present the outside world with an image of serene and joyful royalty. It was up to Bertrand to organize such parties, and more particularly to assess their cost, which the Emperor was to approve. He brought his big accounts book and some invoices to the study for a signature of approval. Napoleon studied them in detail, crossed out some expenses and corrected others.
‘Sunday evening, sire ...’
‘Mustn’t cost more than a thousand francs.’
‘Just the refreshments we agreed before ...’
‘Get rid of the ice cream.’
‘The buffet...’
‘Not before midnight, in the town hall. The guests aren’t going to spend a whole evening nibbling away at our supplies!’
‘If Your Majesty would care to look at the guest list...’
‘Vicentini? No,’ said the Emperor, glancing through the list. ‘He takes advantage, that one does, he stuffs himself and costs us a fortune for nothing.’
‘He’ll sulk ...’
‘Find a mission for him, Bertand, get him away from the Mulini on the day of this damned party.’
‘I’ll come up with something...’
‘Baroness Skupinsky?’
‘Not her, sire, she’s, the wife of a Polish commander. She’ll dance a fandango at the end of the party, as she always does. It’s very amusing and it doesn’t cost us a penny.’
‘And that? What’s that?’
‘The invitation card, Sire.’
‘Remove that idiotic phrase!’
‘Which one, sire?’
‘Sovereign of the island of Elba.’
‘To put what in its place?’
‘The Emperor
invites you, etc., etc. That’s sober and less ridiculous. And what about this invoice?’
‘Ah, the invoice is something else, sire. Her Highness the Princess Pauline has had eight blinds put up in her drawing-room.’
‘Sixty francs?’
‘She supplied the fabric, but making and installing them cost sixty-two francs.’
‘That expense isn’t within the budget, the Princess can pay it herself. Ha? Look who’s here.’
Monsieur Pons was crossing the garden, and in a moment would present himself before the Emperor, who said to Bertrand, ‘You can give him his invitation, it will be one less to carry.’
Monsieur Pons de l’Hérault’s face looked different. A man of strong convictions, he thought only in terms of black and white. After remaining hostile to the tyrant for a long time, the Emperor’s familiarity and trust had turned him into a fervent Bonapartist, and now he was worried.
‘Do you know, sire, what they are chattering about in town?’
‘A lot of old nonsense!’
The Emperor gestured to Bertrand, who slipped out with his files to leave Napoleon in a tête-à-tête with his devoted administrator, who had difficulty finding his words.
‘Well, sire, they’re saying that at the Congress, in Vienna, our enemies are trying to remove you from the coasts of Europe, to take you away from Elba and put you on some incredible island . . .’
‘I know.’
From letters sent by his brothers sewn into the lining of a messenger’s clothes, Napoleon had learned that Talleyrand was demanding that the Emperor be deported to the Azores or the Antilles, or worse, to St Helena, as some English travellers had specified. The Emperor had immediately done some research. St Helena was a wind-battered, fog-bound, volcanic rock between Africa and Brazil, far from the normal maritime routes. A tomb. Pons asked in a faint voice: ‘So it’s true?’
‘Yes, but they won’t do it.’
‘St Helena, sire, I’ve looked it up in my books, and it’s an island shat out by the devil!’
‘I can hold out here for two years, and anything can happen in two years.’
The Emperor mentioned the treaty that the King of France was refusing to respect, the subsidies he was refusing to pay in order to starve his enemy; this attitude was a declaration of war: by betraying his word, he said, the King was putting the Emperor back on the throne, and suddenly, mid-sentence, he asked:
‘Were you a sailor, Pons?’
‘In the Republic, you know that.’
‘I have a mission for you.’
‘Sire, I thank you for your trust. . .’
‘Don’t say a word about it.’
‘I will be silent as the grave.’
‘Without saying a word to anyone, you will organize an expeditionary flotilla.’
‘An expeditionary flotilla? With my barges?’
‘You put ore on them, why not men? And you’ll find other boats to fit out.’
Monsieur Pons withdrew, puffed up with his mission. He imagined landing in Italy, where Napoleon was considered as a potential saviour in the major regions, where patriots were working to turn public opinion in his favour. Throughout the whole of the peninsula, Austria had revived the smaller states the better to control him, but some of those states were resisting the occupying forces. Murat did not bow, but he knew he was threatened. His Kingdom of Naples was to revert to the Bourbons, whose police were printing pamphlets presenting him variously as a commis chef, a cut-throat, a butcher, and the man who shot the Duke of Enghien. Even if his sniggering wife Caroline, the Emperor’s sister, was backing Austria because Prince Metternich had been her lover, Murat still felt isolated. Talleyrand’s support? He would have had to pay him, but how much, and with what? So Murat became Napoleon’s subject once more. Was Napoleon going to land in Naples? Pons wondered.
*
Octave was doing his rounds as the Emperor came back to his bedroom in the Mulini Palace. Each evening Octave cursed because of a door that hadn’t been properly closed, or guards who were missing from one side of the fortifications. Now he leaned over the parapet and studied the piles of rocks at the bottom of the cliff: no sentry there, despite his recommendations, and a rope ladder and a grappling iron would be enough for killers to climb up from the sea unseen, tiptoe across the garden, and disperse around the drawing-rooms to attack first the guards and then the Emperor in his bed. Octave immediately put his mattress outside, on the ground in the promenade gallery, beneath the windows of the Imperial bedroom.
One January morning, he was pulled from sleep by a raging gale. He got up. Because of a thick mist he couldn’t see six feet in front of him, but he heard the gusts, the foliage being blown about, a clattering shutter, orange-trees being toppled by the gale. Huge waves crashed against the walls and rained back down on the terrace. Octave listened hard, and discerned a loud report amid all the hubbub, but it wasn’t the rumble of thunder; it was crisper than that, and repeated at almost regular intervals. It sounded like a cannon. Doubled over by the squall, he walked to the edge of the fortifications. The noise was coming from the sea: a ship in distress was signalling for help. The mist faded away, the sky brightened. Lashed by gusts of wind, Octave clung to the stones of the parapet. He could just make out the shape of a brig washed up on a beach in the bay of Bagnajo. Lying on its side, battered by malevolent waves, one of the ship’s masts was dislodged or broken, its sails in shreds. Napoleon had heard the cannon too, and he now, in his dressing-gown, a knotted madras scarf on his head, and a pair of opera-glasses in his hand, joined Octave.
‘A ship in distress, sire! But take care! The wind is very strong!’
‘What’s that you say?’
With his hair in his eyes and his coat flapping around like a cape, Octave relinquished his grip on the parapet. He tried get the unsteady Emperor to crouch close to the ground lest he be blown over, but His Majesty refused, protesting that he wanted to go straight there, and back he went along the walls, bent so low that he was almost on all fours. Inside the palace he dressed and, before the gale subsided, jumped on his horse and galloped towards the wreck with a platoon of his grenadiers.
Below, dozens of Elbans were at work, fishermen, soldiers, miners. They couldn’t put in their boats, because high and powerful waves tipped them over or threw them back on to the shore.
At that moment, the Emperor recognized the ship with its sides thrashed by the crashing sea: it was the
Inconstant.
Issuing orders with hands and voice, yelling himself hoarse, Napoleon ordered that ropes be thrown - but how? On the overturned ship half-naked sailors, constantly tossed about by the wind and the sea, were trying to save their passengers and help them to the shore, but those boats that had not been smashed already were wedged immovably against the upturned hull. As the squall finally began to ease, the rescuers prepared to tackle the wreck, although her planks were groaning, and she was still being lashed by a heavy sea. One man fell shivering on his knees on the beach and thanked them. On some flat rocks, the Emperor spotted Monsieur Pons, whose miners were scaling the wrecked ship. He approached him.
‘Does this sad picture pierce your heart?’
‘I would say that I’m choking back my anger, sire. If you hadn’t appointed that fool Taillade as captain, your brig would be safe in the roads of Portoferraio.’
‘You’re getting as cross about Taillade as Monsieur Sénécal does.’
‘He’s incompetent and corrupt! I’ve just learned some amazing things about him from some of the passengers whose lives we’ve saved. Taillade has gone on holiday to Corsica, and had dinner there with one of Bruslart’s aides-de-camp . . .’
‘Pfft! He’s more of an idiot than a danger.’
‘Idiots are always dangerous, sire!’
The sea grew calmer, although the waves were still grumbling offshore. Harbour pilots arrived to tow away the wreckage.
‘Give me your opinion, Pons. How long will it take us to raise it?’
‘If the hull isn’t broken, about three weeks.’
‘Make sure that the hull is intact, oversee the work, stay within your time limit. And you will have the
Inconstant
repainted in black and white.’
‘Like an English merchant ship?’
*
Princess Pauline acted as a screen. Napoleon needed her lightness to hide his angers, his worries, his fears for the future. Everyone felt sorry for Paoletta, who was in poor health; previously a regular visitor to spa resorts, she nevertheless persisted in a state of morbid languor even though she had nothing in particular to worry about: she was wealthy, and no one wanted her dead. She wished only to amuse herself and, for the duration of a quadrille, she radiated wit and vivacity. The Emperor had put her in charge of entertainments, so she rehearsed little comedies in the old Mulini barn, organized concerts of flutes and fifes which were attended by the fashionable people of the island. Young lieutenants argued over her, billing and cooing (but none of them got into her bed, since the rooms of the palace were so noisy and all intercommunicated. Even where love affairs were concerned, a minimum of discretion was required so that gossips did not circulate bawdy rumours). The old soldiers of the Guard called her Paoletta and adored her: the tourists admired her when she took a gondola around the gulf or passed through the town lying in a palanquin, the Elbans loved her from the moment she opened a ball by inviting poor, clumsy Cambronne to dance, and had been amused to watch the General trying not to crush her pink silk ballet shoes.
Octave knew that the Princess’s stay in Naples had helped to reconcile Murat and the Emperor, and he gave her credit for that but, if he had been dazzled by her beauty on the road into exile, just before Fréjus, he now saw the goddess from close to — and every day. Even if he did have hot flushes at the sight of those maddening dresses of hers, he was tired of her whims, her pretend sulks, her exaggerations, her perpetual moans.
The Emperor often tried to persuade his sister to take the air, to move around a little, to discover her island. Up until now Octave had escaped the chore of outings, but today Napoleon had deliberately singled him out. The more threats built up, the more severe they grew, and the more the police turned away undesirables - some of whom were found to be carrying sharpened knives - the more specific Napoleon’s plans became (although he didn’t discuss them with anybody), and the more he wished to be surrounded by a carefree atmosphere: Octave among the ladies in waiting, holding Pauline’s arm, signified to the outside world that no major operation was under way, and that the death threats were not being taken seriously.
Octave climbed the steep pink marble staircase leading to Pauline’s apartment on the first floor of the Mulini Palace. His name announced, he entered the large and luminous drawing-room to find some young women dressing the Princess, knotting a draped tunic around her shoulders.
‘I am at Your Highness’s command,’ he said, slightly embarrassed.
‘Where does Nabulione want you to take me?’
‘His Majesty thought the heights of San Martino would bring Your Highness back to health . . .’
‘It’s terribly far away!’
‘An hour by road, at the very most.’
‘But I’ve nothing to wear for the journey!’
‘It’s not really a journey, it’s an outing to the countryside, and the weather is mild ...’
‘You don’t understand a thing, my poor friend!’
Pouting and acting like a girl, Pauline opened a case and rummaged through some scarves, complaining: ‘Everything in France is going to the dogs, Monsieur, no one knows how to bleach malines or scallop a ribbon. Mme Ducluzel sends me lace that isn’t properly white, my dresses don’t fit, I’ve lost lots of weight, and all the hats that come from Leroy are terrible, they’re two inches too big!’