Citizen Emperor (105 page)

When news of Napoleon’s abdication and the end of the war was heard, it was greeted with joy and celebrations throughout Europe. No more so than in Britain where the public celebrated what to all appearances was Napoleon’s final defeat. At Yarmouth, 8,000 people feasted at a table more than a kilometre long.
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Thomas Carlyle, writing to his friend Robert Mitchell, declared that Napoleon had ‘gone to the pot’.
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Only a few months previously, wrote Carlyle, he had been trampling on ‘thrones and sceptres, and kings and priests and principalities and powers, and carried ruin and havoc and blood and fire, from Gibraltar to Archangel’.

‘Napoleon is Always Napoleon’

When Caulaincourt and Macdonald returned from Paris on 2 April to Fontainebleau, they found the place almost empty. A few faithful remained to serve the Emperor, as did some in the imperial household and a few domestics, but many had deserted him. General Pelet remarked that the place was so mournful it seemed as though Napoleon had already been buried. Napoleon’s greatest fear during these days was that he would be killed by an angry mob. ‘His misgivings on that score’, wrote Caulaincourt, ‘outran anything that I could imagine.’
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Napoleon rambled about other great men in history who had taken their lives rather than live in humiliating circumstances, but in this as in all things during this period he appears to have been equivocal. In one breath he could talk about suicide and in the next about how he was ‘condemned’ to live. ‘They say a living gudgeon is better than a dead Emperor.’
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Given his state of mind, those close to him feared that he might attempt to take his own life.

In the night of 12–13 April, a few hours after going to bed, after a fitful sleep, he got up, placed some poison in a glass of water – a mixture of opium, white hellebore and belladonna that he had been carrying around for the past two years – and drank from it. By now, though, the mixture had lost its potency, or was too weak to take effect, and did nothing more than make him sick. He went back to bed, but when his valet saw that he was restless and showing signs of nausea, he fetched Caulaincourt, who sat by him listening to his gloomy views of the world and his fear that he would never reach Elba alive.

It finally dawned on Caulaincourt, as he watched his imperial master writhe, what had happened. He then called for Dr Yvan. Yvan had been with Bonaparte since Italy; it was he who had seen to Napoleon’s wound at Regensburg; he had lived in the Emperor’s intimate circle from the very beginning. When Yvan arrived, and Napoleon called out to him to give him a draught so that he could put an end to his suffering, Yvan refused and made him vomit. Once the Emperor was out of danger, Yvan rushed out of the room, found a horse and rode out into the night to Paris, afraid perhaps that he would be implicated in the suicide, since it was he who had given Napoleon the poison in Russia.
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After vomiting it all back up, Napoleon remained in his apartment, eventually coming around at daybreak, when he began ranting again to the unfortunate Caulaincourt about how he had been mistreated by the sovereigns of Europe, flitting from one subject to another as the morning waxed, about how he would lead a quiet life on Elba, how Louis XVIII would have no need to change anything other than the sheets on his bed, so well run and organized was the administration.

There were a few witnesses to this scene, enough for us to conclude that there was indeed a suicide attempt. Caulaincourt believed that Napoleon had attempted to take his own life because of the humiliation he felt; his honour had been questioned so his life had become unbearable. On Elba, Napoleon denied it. ‘What, kill myself ? Had I nothing better to do than this – like a miserable bankrupt, who, because he has lost his goods, determines to lose his life? Napoleon is always Napoleon, and always will know how to be content and bear any fortune.’
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There was of course a certain amount of shame involved not so much in killing oneself as in failing to do so, which is why he would want to deny it.
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Napoleon’s attempt perhaps places him within Mme de Staël’s category of the ‘repentant criminal’, someone who takes his own life in order to redeem himself, out of remorse, as a kind of apology. One may doubt that Napoleon did it for anything other than self-pity, hence the denial. He had forgotten his own injunction, ‘that a soldier should know how to conquer pain and the melancholy of passions’, that there was as much ‘courage in suffering with constance the sorrows of the heart’ as there was in standing steady before a battery of cannon. There was part of him that did not want to admit that he was weak (in his own estimation, that is), and that he could have contemplated killing himself. Some historians have since questioned whether in fact he had attempted suicide, but the witnesses all agree that he swallowed a potion that night.
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In any event, by morning he had come around; it had become obvious that he was not going to die. ‘I shall live’, he declared, ‘since death is no more willing to take me on my bed than on the battlefield.’ If death had been given a bit of a helping hand, it might have been able to carry out its job.

The Struggle for Marie-Louise

Part of the background to his deepening depression was the struggle over Marie-Louise, who was still in Blois. When she learnt that Napoleon had abdicated (Colonel Galbois had been sent to Blois with a letter from Napoleon announcing this), it came as a shock: in her naivety she was unable to believe that the allies would want to overthrow her husband, convinced as she was that her father would never tolerate it.
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At the time, she reacted like a loyal wife, mother and queen; she wanted to set out immediately to join him at Fontainebleau.
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When, however, she attempted to leave, on the morning of 9 April, her escape was stymied by her lady-in-waiting, the Duchesse de Montebello, who was able to dissuade her from carrying through her plan (the Duchesse was afraid of ending up on Elba).
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Two things had happened the previous day that made her open to persuasion. The first was that she had had to cope with the Bonaparte brothers. When Joseph learnt of Napoleon’s abdication, he was deeply afflicted by the news, while Jérôme exploded in anger.
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Then, when they realized that Marie-Louise might leave they burst into her apartments in travelling clothes on the morning of Good Friday (8 April), told her that the Russian army was close (which was a lie) and that they all had to depart at once.
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There ensued a shouting match between the two deposed kings, Joseph and Jérôme, and Marie-Louise; the Empress’s guard refused to allow her to leave.
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The second thing that happened was the arrival of the Tsar’s aide-de-camp, General Count Shuvalov, and the Baron de Saint-Aignan, the representative of the provisional government. Shuvalov’s mission was to escort her to Rambouillet, where her father was to meet her.
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Halfway along the road to Fontainebleau was Orleans; she naively thought that she could travel on to her husband from there. In any event, the allies and the provisional French government were not yet acting in concert. The provisional French government decided that it had to prevent the imperial couple from meeting up by all possible means. It did not want Napoleon placing himself under the protection of the House of Habsburg, a wish it shared with Napoleon himself.
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Marie-Louise wrote to her husband on 8 April to say that she was leaving the next day for Orleans, and that she would be in Fontainebleau the day after.
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Two days later she wrote to say that she had decided to see her father first, and that she believed it her duty to do so, in the interests of Napoleon and her son.
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Her departure from Blois (for Orleans) on 9 April in the company of Shuvalov led to a veritable exodus from her entourage. Her decision not to join her husband in exile once led historians to judge her as having a weak, irresolute character.
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This is undeserved; one has to take into consideration Napoleon’s own vacillation on the subject. Shortly before leaving Blois, Marie-Louise wrote to Napoleon at Fontainebleau to say, ‘I am awaiting orders from you, and I do beseech you to let me come.’
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The lack of decisiveness can be seen in a letter he wrote to an exhausted, sickly Marie-Louise at Orleans.
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His letters during this period show a mind in torment, about his own future and the future of his son. It is easy to conclude from them that he was convinced even at this late stage that Marie-Louise would accompany him to Elba, but anecdotal evidence suggests that he was more than hesitant about obliging her to live in exile.
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We know that Francis delayed his entrance into Paris so that it did not coincide with the fall of his daughter from the throne.
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It is likely that, as a result of Napoleon’s letters, Marie-Louise now saw her father as her only means of protection.
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She wrote to Francis on 10 April (twice) to say that she was not going to join Napoleon.
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It was becoming clear in her letters that she had been swayed by the Austrian lobby, so to speak, and Metternich’s assurances that she and her son would have an independent existence.
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She was apparently turning her back on her husband and putting herself under the protection of her father, but then nothing in the official letters to Napoleon can be taken at face value; they were being read by those who now controlled her movements.

We get a better insight into the workings of her mind from a note to Napoleon scribbled on the way from Orleans to Rambouillet and which was delivered by a Polish officer in her confidence. In it, she exhorts, ‘Be on your guard . . . we are being played, I am in mortal anxiety for you, but I will have courage on seeing my father and I will tell him I want absolutely to join you.’
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But Marie-Louise was a young woman of twenty-two who was torn between loyalty to her husband, ensuring a future for her son, and loyalty to her father. That same day, pressured by the Austrian envoys sent by her father, she left for Rambouillet. ‘I thought that I should concede with good grace,’ she wrote to her husband, ‘but when I have seen him [Francis], I will come and join you; one would have to be barbaric to try and stop me.’
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When she arrived at Rambouillet, her father was not yet there. Metternich was trying to draw her even further away from Fontainebleau by persuading her to join her father at Trianon in Versailles where he had decided to set up house while in Paris. She was convinced that they were doing all of that to get her to come to Austria, but she still insisted in her letters to Napoleon that she was going to join him.
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She used a sore throat as a pretext not to leave Rambouillet, so that Francis and Metternich were obliged to travel to her. We do not know what was said between Francis and his daughter, in the presence of Metternich, when he arrived in there on 14 April, but they persuaded her to leave for Austria.
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She apparently fell back into the role of the dutiful daughter. It was an easier role than that of an independent, strong-willed woman.
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She no longer had to think; she simply had to obey, what she had really wanted all along. She wrote to Napoleon to tell him that she was going back to Vienna, ‘because my father desires it so strongly, and I see that if I do not go, they will take me by force’. Her plan, she explained, was to travel to Parma during the international congress that was convened in Vienna to discuss the make-up of Europe, and from there to Elba.
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According to the letter, her father was opposed to the plan, which means she had discussed it with him, but that for the moment she did not want to insist, ‘so I beg you not to tell anyone, because that would spoil everything’. ‘He has been very good to me,’ she wrote of her father, ‘but it has not eased the terrible shock he gave me, preventing me from joining you, from seeing you, from travelling with you.’ She concluded, ‘It is impossible for me to be happy without you.’

The Long Goodbye

Colonel Sir Neil Campbell, who had fought with Wellington in the Peninsula, and had been at the battle of Bautzen, arrived at Fontainebleau on 16 April ready to escort Napoleon to the south, only to find that the Prussians had already made all the arrangements. The other three allied commissioners who were to accompany Napoleon on the road to Elba were already there: the Russian Count Shuvalov, the Prussian Count Truchsess-Waldburg and the Austrian General Baron Franz Köller. Campbell had his first audience with Napoleon the next morning, 17 April, after mass. Campbell’s left eye was covered in a bandage and his arm was in a sling from wounds received at La-Fère-Champenoise on 26 March, when a party of Cossacks mistook him for a Frenchman. Campbell, who spoke French well, arrived only a few days after the attempted suicide. The meeting must have been a strange one. Napoleon, unshaven, uncombed, with particles of snuff scattered on his upper lip and breast, was ‘in the most perturbed and distressed state of mind’. ‘I saw before me’, wrote Campbell of their first encounter, ‘a short active-looking man, who was rapidly pacing the length of his apartment, like some wild animal in his cell.’
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When he spoke of being separated from his wife and child, ‘the tears actually ran down his cheeks. He continued to talk in a wild and excited style, being at times greatly affected.’
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The Austrian representative, Baron Köller, observed Napoleon unnoticed, while at mass in the palace chapel. The Emperor sometimes rubbed ‘his forehead with his hands, then stuffing part of his fingers into his mouth’, gnawed ‘the ends of them in the most agitated and excited manner’.
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Over the coming days, he would alternate between these moments of extreme distress and utter calm.