Napoleon's Exile (13 page)

‘Can we break through that encirclement and reach the Loire?' asked Macdonald.

‘Soult has fifty thousand men beneath the walls of Toulouse, Suchet is bringing fifteen thousand back from Catalonia; in Italy Prince Eugène has about thirty thousand soldiers, Augereau commands fifteen thousand in the Cévennes. Let's not forget the border garrisons, and General Maisons' army, and my Guard, the twenty-five thousand of my Guard!'

The marshals were dismayed and made no secret of the fact. Their faces darkened and they averted their eyes.

‘Do you want a rest?

‘The army is finished, sire,' said Macdonald. ‘More and more people are deserting, the men are demoralized by the defection of the 6th Corps...'

‘Poor Marshals! Poor heroes! Poor dishonoured people thinking only of my death!'

‘Sire!'

‘Do you know how many kinds of grief and danger await you on your feather beds?'

The Emperor moved to sit down behind a little mahogany pedestal table on which the Duke of Bassano had arranged pens, ink and paper. Pale, and with a nervous hand, Napoleon began to write a text that he had already pondered; the ink blotted on the paper, which was wrinkled by his passing pen. He crossed out the word ‘nation' and replaced it with ‘France'.

‘Read!'

He held the paper out to Ney, but his scrawls were barely legible, and Bassano read for him:

The allied powers having proclaimed that the Emperor Napoleon was the sole obstacle to the re-establishment of peace in Europe, the Emperor, true to his oath, declares that he renounces the thrones of France and Italy, both for himself and for his heirs, and that there is no personal sacrifice, even that of his own life, that he is not prepared to make in the interests of France.

Ney and Macdonald, who had ceased to believe that this would happen, eagerly approached the Emperor with great relief, and gripped his hands: ‘Sire! Never have you shown more greatness!'

Ney took advantage of Napoleon that same day, requesting a large sum of money from the monarch he had helped to sell. The Emperor let him have it.

*

The marshals left again that evening to arrange an honourable treaty with the conquerors in exchange for the Emperor's abdication, and to defend as best they could the interests of Napoleon, his wife, their son, the army and the servants of Empire. Octave saw them setting off as he returned to the palace (after asking shoemaker Boiron about the intentions of the royalist party; Maubreuil seemed to have abandoned his planned assassination, and had disappeared).

In Fontainebleau, the feverish atmosphere of the past few days had subsided once more. The palace had emptied, and all of a sudden it seemed vast. Octave sometimes came across shadows in the deserted galleries; no one ventured a comment or a greeting, they were all thinking of their imminent departure, constructing noble and credible excuses, a sick relation, funds they had to find, an invitation. Even before the treaty had been drawn up and ratified by the allies, generals and dukes were declaring their allegiance to Louis XVIII - meaning Talleyrand - in order to gain privileges. First Oudinot, then Mortier, the oh-so-republican Jourdan, Kellermann, Ségur, Hulin, Latour Maubourg: almost everyone.

Even in the midst of so swift a collapse, the Emperor still put up a good show, and altered none of his domestic habits. When he got up, Constant presented him with a basin filled with soapy orange-scented water and he plunged his hands up to his forearms and moistened his chin, splashing his flannel waistcoat, everyone present, and the floor. Then, by the mirror that Roustan was holding in the light from a window, he began to shave, sliding his mother-of-pearl-handled cut-throat razor down his face, contrary to the practice of barbers. He had always shaved himself, perhaps as a precaution, refusing to allow anyone else to wield a blade anywhere near his throat. He'd often joked about it, referring to Hieron of Syracuse, the tyrant in Xenophon, who never turned his back on a window for fear of a dagger or an arrow - but his thoughts were becoming ghoulish with the passing days, while his fate was being decided in Paris among strangers, hard-line royalists and traitors.

‘I can think of lots of people who would like to use this razor to open my throat. Of course, they're annoyed that I'm still alive! And besides, so am I. If those runts had any idea! I don't give a damn about power! A throne is nothing but a bit of gilded wood to park your arse on!'

As Octave arrived with the steaming infusion, the sound of wheels was heard in the courtyard. The Emperor froze mid-gesture.

‘What's that?'

‘A coach by the steps,' said Octave, glancing out of the window.

‘Is it Berthier? Is he coming back?'

‘No, sire, it's General Friant leaving.'

‘Friant...'

Napoleon washed his hands with almond paste and said not another word; he felt under-occupied, which he hated. Meanwhile Bassano brought him the latest news from Paris, always in the same fashion: pamphlets, gazettes, a booklet by Chateaubriand attributing to the Emperor every vice in hell and earth, while painting an angelic portrait of Louis XVIII; printed songs, a swarm of caricatures (one of which showed him as a spinning-top whipped by the sovereigns of Europe; on another, the north wind blew to scatter his victory bulletins and decrees). Some jokers had discovered that Napoleon was the name of a devil in the
Acts of the Saints
, others mockingly claimed that his first name was really Nicolas. He was only moved by one drawing showing the King of Rome: the child passed a rope around the neck of a bust of the Emperor beneath the legend
Papas tie.

‘Everything's shrinking,' he said with a moue of disgust.

Then he voiced his astonishment to Bassano at the fact that he had stopped receiving notes from the Empress; he had written to her every day while he had been in Fontainebleau, and hand-selected officers regularly carried letters between the two, but what had happened? The road to Blois was blocked, the messengers intercepted, Napoleon lamented, he knew that Marie-Louise was weak and ill, prey to insomnia and to fits of weeping. She was sorry to have left Paris, she was sorry no longer to be near him. The Emperor was alone. His family had fled. His mother was probably in Rome, and Louis was in Switzerland, where Joseph and Jérôme were preparing to join him.

While his enemies were agreeing his destiny, the Emperor ventured out of his bedroom and went for a walk in the little garden near the chapel, solidly enclosed by thick stone walls.

From the old deer gallery overlooking the garden, the Duke of Bassano and Octave observed the Emperor: he paced along the avenues, taking great strides, a stick in his hand, breaking the branches of the shrubs, mammocking the flower-beds, decapitating the flowers with lashing blows, leaving petals flying in his wake.

‘You will keep an eye on His Majesty at all times,' said Bassano, placing a familiar hand on Octave's shoulder. ‘I'm sure there were many occasions during the last campaign when he wanted to die and I heard he sought out dangerous situations, as though to make an end to it. In Troyes, I know that he drew his parade sword against some uhlans who had surrounded him, and that he looked utterly devastated when he was saved in the very nick of time. At Arcis-sur-Aube, when the situation was becoming disastrous, he spurred his horse towards a shell that had fallen a moment before. The shell exploded and disembowelled his horse, and it was only by some miracle that he managed to get away. It all worries me, Monsieur Sénécal, unlike your pompous fool Maubreuil, who vanished into thin air as I predicted he would.'

‘I have just learned that he is recruiting killers...'

‘Let him recruit as he will, the worst of the Emperor's murderers is the Emperor himself.'

Down below, Napoleon had interrupted his walk and was prodding his stick into a pile of sand, like a sword into a belly.

*

In Fontainebleau the days passed, empty and tense; everyone was spying on the Emperor, puzzling over his slightest words in search of a double meaning, and interpreting his every gesture as a cause for concern. Roustan had noticed him dreamily turning a powder horn around in his hand, and took advantage of a moment when His Majesty had left his room to filch the bullets lined up in his pouch. Then Constant was about to hide the powder horn, but the Emperor caught him at it.

‘Monsieur Constant! My son! Do you think I'm planning on killing myself? Suicide is for gamblers! And anyway, death wants none of me, as you know ...'

His tone sounded false. Napoleon had no reassuring words for those around him. When he was splashing in his bath and called for a brazier of coal, his valets found reasons not to bring it to him. Did he want to asphyxiate himself? He regained a degree of self-control when a liaison officer who had managed to penetrate enemy lines gave him a letter from Marie-Louise which he read and reread. The Empress suggested joining him in his exile: ‘All I desire,' she wrote, ‘is to be able to share your ill fortune.' She also told him that she would soon be leaving Blois to see the Emperor of Austria, her father, in the Palace of Rambouillet, which did not please Napoleon at all. He asked the Duke of Bassano if the chasseurs of his Guard still had a general; yes, they did. Napoleon immediately summoned him to one of his drawing-rooms. Pierre Cambronne came straight away, one leg stiff and his left arm in a sling; he had been wounded at Craonne and at Bar-sur-Aube. His face was wrinkled from top to bottom, with a wide thin mouth that resembled a straight line drawn with a pencil, and the round, mobile eyes of a bird.

‘General,' said the Emperor when he saw him, ‘can you still ride a horse?'

‘I live on horseback, sire!'

‘In spite of your recent wounds?'

‘Forgive me, but you are getting muddled. I took a bullet in the buttock at Austerlitz. My leg and my left arm don't stop me getting into the saddle or wielding a sword!'

‘Thank you,' said Napoleon, smiling for the first time in weeks. ‘General, I am pleased that you have not left Fontainebleau.'

‘Where would I have gone?'

‘To Paris, like everyone else.'

‘I'm not like everyone else!'

‘I know, Cambronne, but you will have to leave anyway.'

‘To prostrate myself before the Bourbons! In that, sire, if you will forgive me, you are asking too much of me after twenty years of war! If anyone else suggested abandoning you, I would take it as a mortal insult!'

‘Assemble two battalions of the Guard, take four cannon with you and bring my son and the Empress back from Blois.'

‘Will she agree?'

‘If she hesitates, kidnap her.'

It was an order. Soon, the Emperor would be issuing no more.

*

The palace became a prison. Napoleon waited dejectedly, unable to make a decision. He who had governed all the people, all the subjects of his vast Empire, now made only trifling decisions. He reserved his commands for commis chefs and underlings, and only lost his temper over too hot an infusion, a crumpled blanket, cold lentils. He couldn't even complain about the noise: the few occupants of the castle walked silently around like monks. When he heard a coach, he knew it meant that another of his men was leaving. He didn't try to restrain those who had served him; on the contrary, he encouraged them to join the new government and make themselves known to the Bourbons - they were not to miss the opportunity of a job or an income because of some pointless sense of devotion. Even his Mameluke went off to see his wife in Paris, swearing to come back - but what did it matter? Each hour the Emperor passed merely reinforced his humiliation and his helplessness. Indolent, absent-minded and broken, he barely reacted to anything. Octave never took his eyes off him, in accordance with Bassano's instructions, and one morning, coming into the bedroom, he saw Napoleon slumped in his armchair with blood on his white breeches. He had lacerated his thigh with his fingernails.

On the morning of 12 April, the bad news started coming in thick and fast. First of all Peyrusse, the official paymaster, returned without having recovered any of the diamonds or the millions from the civil list that had been confiscated by the court: in the name of the King, a certain Marquis de la Grange had boarded and inspected the convoy near Orléans and taken the money to the Tuileries; under the eye of the National Guard, the vans had still not been unloaded because Treasury servants were arguing with the royalists who wanted to hang on to the loot. Later that day, General Cambronne also returned empty-handed. By the time he had reached Blois Castle, the Empress had already left for the Palace of Rambouillet, where her father was waiting for her.

Finally, in the evening, Caulaincourt and Macdonald brought in the treaty drawn up by the allies. As long as the ex-Emperor fled immediately, most of his wishes had been respected, except for one which concerned Marie-Louise; she would not be given Tuscany as a place of retirement, since her own father's delegation opposed the idea. ‘Those Austrians have no guts!' said Napoleon. All that was missing now was his signature, and his kingdom would be reduced to a rock in the Mediterranean, the island of Elba that he had been granted after dreaming of Corfu or Corsica. He balked at the idea. ‘To force me to sign this treaty,' he maintained, ‘is to prolong my agony . . .'

*

Octave replaced Roustan the Mameluke outside the Emperor's door. He was lying on the trestle bed when he heard a voice calling. He gave a start, leapt up, grabbed a torch and walked unceremoniously into the room. Napoleon was sunk amid his pillows. By the faint night-light his bed, raised on its velvet platform and overshadowed by a tester, looked like a catafalque, but the prostrate figure was murmuring: ‘Monsieur Sénécal, I am going to get up.'

As he set his torch down on a table, Octave noticed that the clock read four in the morning. He brought slippers, helped the Emperor into his damask dressing-gown, stirred the dying fire, put the broken logs back on the firedog, then, crouching on all fours, blew on the embers.