Betsy and the Emperor (9781439115879) (18 page)

But Boney lost far more than I: his crown, empire, armies, his nation, his family, and his freedom. And yet he went on, did he not? With dignity and courage, in the face of all that. He had lost so much more than I was losing now.

If Boney could go on, then surely I must. And the emperor would expect no less of me.

It began to rain. I leaned over the ship's railing, watching the storm as we pulled away from shore. Lightning flashes ripped jaggedly across the sky. Off in the distance a dog howled—a lonely, horrible sound. I shuddered.

I felt a gentle hand on my shoulder.

“Don't be scared of the thunder, Betsy,” Jane said. “I'm here.”

I stared at her, surprised by her kindness. But for the next while she did not leave my side. We stood there at the rail, taking a long last look at the dark, black hump of St. Helena.

Jane held my hand. She was my sister, after all.

And far away, a pale yellow light hovered over Longwood.

 

It was three years later—some twenty years ago now as I write these words—on an unusually cold day in May 1821 when news reached me in London of the emperor's death.

Some say he was poisoned by his enemies. I know better. He died of a broken heart.

N
early a year after that sad day in 1821, my husband, Mr. Abell and I (yes, the unruly girl of my youth had blossomed into a rather appealing young woman, or so my husband claims; and would you believe it?—he is a distant relation of the execrable Ensign Carstairs!) were honeymooning in the north of France.

In a small town there we came upon a charming country inn and thought it would be a fine place to spend the night. While my husband unloaded our trunk from our carriage, I went inside to inquire about a room.

A man was bent over behind the front desk polishing his shoes. I stood before him, but he didn't notice me.

Weary, and getting a bit impatient to turn in for the night, I cleared my throat to catch his attention, but to no avail.

“Concierge!”
I said, ringing the bell on his desk.
“Avez-vous une chambre, s'il vous plaît?”

The man raised himself up slowly and looked at me. And to my astonishment, standing there before me was Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte!

My husband walked in dragging our trunk and found me dumbfounded, frozen like a statue in front of the desk. “Are—are you all right, darling?” my husband said. But my attention was wholly fixed elsewhere.

“It's me—me, Betsy!” I said to that old familiar face. “Betsy Balcombe!”

But the man behind the counter did not seem to recognize me. Tears came to my eyes—along with sorrowful realization. I trembled and extended my hand to him.

“It is a pleasure to meet you…,” I said, voice shaking with emotion, “Monsieur Roberaud.”

Betsy Balcombe (later, Mrs. Abell) was a real girl who came to know and befriend Napoleon Bonaparte during the early years of his captivity on St. Helena. By some accounts, Betsy was fourteen when the emperor arrived on the island; others say she was thirteen. I chose to make her fourteen in my story so she could grow up more quickly.

In 1844 the real Betsy wrote an autobiography titled
Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon During the First Three Years of His Captivity in the Island of St. Helena, Including the time of his Residence at her Father's House, “Briars”
(London: John Murray). I have gone to enormous lengths to avoid reading this book as I feared it would be so charming that it might discourage me from having the temerity to attempt to tell Betsy's story in my own way.

While I encountered in the course of my reading only brief excerpts from Mrs. Abell's book, I have studied many of the accounts written by others who knew Napoleon—and Betsy—on St. Helena, including Dr. Barry O'Meara's book.
¹
By all accounts, the emperor loathed Sir Hudson Lowe, his chief jailer. Some contend this antipathy was well earned. Nearly all the characters in
Betsy and
the Emperor
—including the rather silly Gourgaud, the gardener Toby, and the eccentric Huff—were based on real people, though Toby was actually Malayan, not Haitian. Even Tom Pipes, the Newfoundland dog, was a genuine resident of St. Helena—familiar to, though not owned by, the Balcombes. And Jonathan, the governor's tortoise, did indeed outlive both him and Napoleon and is still alive on St. Helena, at the ripe old age of about two hundred.

In my book I have quoted the real Napoleon Bonaparte more often than you would probably suppose. And a surprising number of the major and minor incidents in my story—for example, Betsy's turning the emperor's own sword against him, her “imprisonment” in the wine cellar, and her father's smuggling letters for Napoleon—really took place.

Napoleon was moved to Longwood on December 10, 1815. Governor Lowe arrived on St. Helena on April 16 of the following year. I reversed the order of these events so as to keep Betsy and her emperor together longer than might otherwise have been the case. And I telescoped the symptoms of Bonaparte's final illness so Betsy could witness more of it than she did in real life.

Betsy's attempts to help the emperor escape are my invention. At least, I think so—since, as I say, I have not read her book. But crazy old Huff did indeed believe it
was his destiny to help the emperor escape from St. Helena. And the emperor's double, Roberaud, existed. In fact, at least one author has suggested (somewhat ridiculously, in my opinion) that perhaps the man who died on St. Helena was Roberaud and not the real Napoleon.

The emperor passed from this world at 5:49
P.M.
on May 5, 1821. As stated in my book, Betsy was not present for this event. The emperor's last words were:
“France, armée, tête de l'armée, Joséphine”
(“France, army, head of the army, Joséphine”). He was buried on St. Helena, and his body was removed from there for reburial in Paris nearly two decades later, where he was greeted by throngs of weeping Parisians, including some of his former soldiers.
²

Present when Napoleon Bonaparte's body was exhumed on St. Helena were a number of his old comrades, including Gourgaud, the emperor's valet Marchand, Grand Marshal Bertrand, and Betsy's nemesis, Emmanuel de Las Cases (“
le petit
Las Cases”).
³

When the emperor's coffin was opened, an astonished Bertrand suddenly rushed toward the corpse. Napoleon's body was in a remarkable state of preservation. His fingernails and a beard stubble had grown after death, his skin was a healthy color, and his face and hands looked much as they had when his friends had known him. As Las Cases put it: “At the sight of what death had wrought—changes that were more like life than death in
spite of the time that had elapsed—we were all suddenly overcome with feelings impossible to describe.”
⁴

Some historians theorize that the reason Napoleon's body was in such good condition after nineteen years in the ground was that he had been gradually poisoned by his enemies—Count Montholon or Governor Lowe perhaps?—using arsenic, an element with preservative qualities. Historians disagree about whether Napoleon was really murdered, but there is some evidence to support this. Modern tests by the FBI and Britain's Scotland Yard, among others, show traces of arsenic in locks of Napoleon's hair that he gave friends as souvenirs. Whether the arsenic got into the emperor's system via enemies bent on murdering him or by natural causes (possible explanations for dangerously high levels of arsenic in his bloodstream might include eating shellfish, using hair tonic, taking medicine, or even exposure to toxins from the moldy green wallpaper at Longwood) is open to debate. Personally, I prefer Betsy's theory: The emperor died of a broken heart.

And now, if you will excuse me, perhaps I will finally get around to reading Betsy Balcombe Abell's autobiography. If she were still with us today, I think she might forgive me for writing this story in her name—for the purpose of exposing a whole new generation to Emperor Napoleon's softer side and the rough treatment he received at the hands of Sir Hudson Lowe.

Any quotes in this book attributed to Betsy, Napoleon, or members of his suite were either invented by me or taken directly from historical accounts: original sources, most of which were written by the emperor's staff who attended him on St. Helena. Napoleon and his suite knew that his thoughts and words would be important to preserve for posterity, so they spent a good deal of time recording them on paper. Every day of his life on St. Helena is accounted for. In cases where I didn't have these original nineteenth-century sources myself, I had books quoting from them.

Examples of conversations from my book that (with only slight variation) really took place include Napoleon's “quizzing” Betsy about European capitals and boasting that he burned Moscow, as well as his warmly comforting and revealing comments when he spoke to her through the bars of her wine cellar “prison.” Discovering the latter conversation was what first prompted me to want to tell Betsy's story.

Napoleon's own account of his triumphant return to Paris from his first exile in Elba is recounted in my book (almost) verbatim.

Gourgaud's whiny outburst at the dinner table—in which he complains of being a prisoner—and Napoleon's reply to it (“You are a brave man but amazingly childish,” etc.) also really took place. It's also true that Gourgaud once saved the emperor's life (from “that Cossack at Brienne”), and never let him forget it.

In some cases I used in my story things Napoleon actually said at some point in his life (e.g., “The corpse of an enemy always smells sweet”) but in a different context.

My research on Napoleon's actual personal habits and quirks also figured into the story. When angry, his left thigh muscle really did twitch due to an old war wound. He was indeed fond of licorice candy, had an amazingly retentive memory, was a bit of a prankster (the emperor loved mocking his “scary” image and once mussed up his hair and growled to frighten the Balcombe boys), and enjoyed playing games, like blindman's bluff and whist, and giving little gifts to children. The emperor also read plays aloud—very badly—and would become irritated when his staff members fell asleep while listening to him recite.

It was a bone of contention between Napoleon and his British captors that they refused to call him by his most recent official title, “Emperor.” Perhaps it was one of the things that first intrigued Napoleon about Betsy—that she wasn't frightened of him but was also one of the few
people on St. Helena, other than his staff, who paid him the respect of recognizing his proper title (Napoleon: “And what am I, pray?” Betsy: “An emperor”). But she also called him “Boney,” and he didn't seem to mind.

A map of St. Helena will reveal that if one travels (as Betsy does) from the Briars to Jamestown, one will not pass Plantation House along the way—at least, not without a very roundabout method of getting from here to there. I altered the two houses' positions relative to each other so that I could introduce my readers to Plantation House early in the story.

The island of St. Helena, one of the most remote places on earth, is still a dependency of Great Britain. Only 10.5 miles long by 6.5 miles wide, it is located in the South Atlantic Ocean at latitude 16°S, longitude 5°45' W; has no airport (though it may have one soon); and can be reached only by ship. St. Helenians were granted full British citizenship starting in 2002.

In my story Napoleon says to Admiral Cockburn that the “nearest land” to St. Helena is the continent of Africa, about 1,200 miles (over 1,900 kilometers) away. But in fact, the nearest land is Ascension Island—703 miles from St. Helena. Even if Napoleon knew of Ascension Island, it would have done him little good to escape to that tiny (35 square miles), isolated place, which is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, about halfway between South America and Africa. So this explains why, in my book, Napoleon says that Africa is the closest land to St. Helena.

THE CODE NAPOLEON

A full English translation of the French Civil Code (“Code Napoleon”) drafted in 1801 and first published in 1804 can be found at http://www.napoleonseries.org/reference/political/code.cfm. Napoleon considered the code to be his crowning achievement. It was really a reformation and consolidation of previous French civil laws, and Napoleon did not actually “write” the code—though he (and the commission of experts he organized, whose meetings he often attended) was unquestionably the driving force behind its creation and contributed ideas to it. The code—originally intended as a compact, one-volume guide to French law that any citizen could read and understand—is still the foundation of France's legal system today, and more than twenty nations have based their laws upon it.

THE NATIONAL ANTHEM OF FRANCE

“La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France—composed by army Captain Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle—began life in 1792 as “The Battle Song of the Army of the Rhine” during the French Revolution. A royalist, Rouget de Lisle would have been killed in the wave of
public executions of supposed “enemies” of the state, the “Reign of Terror” that followed the overthrow of France's king, but his life was spared due to the success of his song.

“La Marseillaise” was declared a “national song” on Bastille Day in 1795. Ironically Napoleon himself, who had fought in support of the French Revolution, was not a huge fan of “La Marseillaise” and later banned it, possibly because he didn't want to encourage another revolution—against his own government. The ban continued under the Restoration, and “La Marseillaise” did not become the national anthem of France until 1879. As sung today, “La Marseillaise” is based on the “official” version adopted by the Ministry of War in 1887.

Excerpts from the lyrics to “La Marseillaise” (with English translation next to the French verses) can be found at a Fordham University Web site: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/marseill.html.

Another translation of “La Marseillaise” can be found at the Web site of the Office of the French President (Presidence de la Republique) at http://www.elysee.fr/ang/instit/symb1_.htm.