Citizen Emperor (106 page)

His departure was planned for the morning of 20 April. Napoleon wrote a letter that morning telling Marie-Louise that he intended leaving, and he told Berthier to inform the commissioners that he would indeed be setting off that day. At ten o’clock, however, he informed Köller that he had changed his mind and that he would not be leaving for Elba after all. He insisted that, since the allies had refused to let his wife follow him, they had broken their undertakings; then, vaguely threatening to raise a new army, he repeated that he might seek refuge in England.
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Köller and the other commissioners were obliged to argue with him for two hours. In the end he was persuaded to leave; what choice did he have?

According to most accounts, Napoleon descended the grand horseshoe staircase in the château’s Courtyard of the White Horse, where the Old Guard were waiting in order of battle. The courtyard was also filled with onlookers from the town and the surrounding areas. Maret, whose account of this scene is probably the most accurate, asserts that he came down the stairs ‘in an attitude as assured as if he were ascending the steps to the throne’.
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He then addressed the troops in a farewell that is one of the high points of the legend. ‘Officers and soldiers of the Guard, I bid you farewell. I have sacrificed all my rights, and am ready to sacrifice myself, for all my life has been devoted to the happiness and glory of France.’
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Rather than risk civil war, he had committed the ultimate sacrifice, for the good of France of course. He could not kiss them all goodbye, he said, but he would kiss their general (Charles Lefebvre-Desnouettes), which he then proceeded to do. Next, in a somewhat melodramatic gesture, even for the time, he kissed the Guard’s standard three times, and covered his face with it for almost a minute. Raising his left hand he spoke out, ‘Farewell, my old companions! My good wishes will always be with you! Keep me in your memories!’
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– or something to that effect. The message was printed in the newspapers of the day – a sort of press release – and reproduced verbatim in later memoirs.

Napoleon was visibly moved, but one cannot help but wonder how much of this emotion was self-pity, and how much was show put on for his men and for posterity. We have seen how he agonized not over the fate of France, but over his own fate. Of course, it is possible to agonize over both, but Napoleon always put the interests of himself and his family before that of the
patrie
. The message contained in his words and gestures is in any event clear: his main concern had always been the glory of France and the whole of Europe had been armed against him – that is, against France. He presented himself as the sacrificial lamb, the man who could have fought on if he had chosen to, but who decided that it was better to avoid ‘civil war’. Of course the logic of the situation seems to have escaped most, that this was a predicament of his own making.

The timing of Napoleon’s melodramatic gesture was perfect. According to all the accounts, there was hardly a dry eye in the house; tears streamed down the faces of most of the men present, hardened killers the lot.
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It even moved the four foreign representatives who wept out of empathy, sharing the moment, realizing possibly that an era had come to an end. That tearful farewell obviously represented different things to different men, but for the faithful this sort of communal mourning was prompted by the loss of the one they had followed and idolized for years. They were losing their father. The Guard then burnt the eagles and, according to some accounts, divided the ashes among themselves. Some took the gesture even further by eating the ashes so that they would not become separated from them.
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Napoleon then got into a carriage with Bertrand and drove off, or rather fourteen carriages transporting Napoleon and his entourage, escorted by a group of cavalry, drove off.
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As he passed through the gates he lowered the window, and was seen with tears in his eyes.
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If the faithful shed a tear, others were glad to see the back of him, while yet others would try to get a piece of him. At Nevers, some 175 kilometres further south, townspeople cried out, ‘Vive l’Empereur!’, giving him the mistaken impression that he was not as hated as some of the newspapers made out. When they came to Villeneuve-sur-Allier on Friday evening (22 April), the cavalry escort that had accompanied them up to that point returned home. They were to be replaced by Austrian and Russian cavalry, but Napoleon brashly refused their help asserting, because of the reception he had received till then, that he had no need of them. He soon learnt to regret his decision. By the time he reached Montélimar (25 April), not far from Lyons, he had become aware of a change in attitude among the people he encountered. Indeed, the cries of ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ became increasingly scarce after Villeneuve-sur-Allier, replaced with cries of ‘Vivent les Bourbons!’ and ‘Vive Louis XVIII!’ At Orange, he was greeted with shouts of ‘Vive le Roi!’, was jeered at and had stones thrown at his carriage. At Valence he was greeted with silence.
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At Avignon, a town that had celebrated his fall, the procession passed through at six in the morning. A crowd of two to three hundred people had turned out to see him, and menacingly surrounded his carriage as the horses were being changed. In the end, there was little more than a few boos but it must have put the wind up him.
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At Orgon, twenty-four kilometres from Avignon, the convoy was met at the entrance to the town by a stuffed dummy hung from a gibbet. A bloody inscription – ‘Sooner or later, this will be the fate of the tyrant’ – was placed on its stomach; the victim was meant to represent Napoleon. The crowd, ‘drunk with hatred’, climbed on to the carriage, shook their fists at him and cried (in the local Provençal dialect), ‘Open the doors!’, ‘Drag him out!’, ‘Hang him!’, ‘Cut off his head!’ Others threw stones at the carriage while some women shouted, ‘Give me back my son!’ According to one witness, Napoleon hid behind Bertrand: ‘he was pale, desperate and speechless’.
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It was Shuvalov who saved the day by laying into the crowd with his fists, all the while shouting that he was Russian to ensure that they would not turn on him; he managed to quieten them long enough to harangue them into submission.
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Alfred-Nicolas Normand,
Façade sur la cour des Adieux et l’escalier du Fer à Cheval
(A view of the Farewell Courtyard and the horseshoe staircase). This was built by Francis I, and dubbed the Staircase of the White Horse, at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, the setting of Napoleon’s farewell to the Guard, 1888.

As a result of this confrontation, Napoleon decided, as a precautionary measure, to change into a shabby blue riding-coat, and to wear a round hat sporting the Bourbon white cockade. He mounted one of the post-horses and rode on ahead of the convoy, accompanied by a courier named Pélart. At Saint-Cannat, Berthier and a courier by the name of Vernet, who had taken Napoleon’s place in the carriage, were surrounded by an angry crowd and attacked with stones, which broke the windows of the carriage. When the rest of the party caught up with Napoleon at an inn called La Calade about three leagues out of Aix, they found him in a small room, his elbows on the table, head in his hands, tears streaming down his face, lost in reflection.
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He had been unsettled by the landlady, who had ranted against Napoleon for causing the deaths of her son and nephew. She did not think that the Emperor would make it away alive, and that he would be justly murdered along the way. Little did she know, of course, that Napoleon was right in front of her while she said this. He had refused to touch the food for fear of being poisoned and sent for some bread and wine from his carriage. When he discovered that there was no back door or window through which he could slip out, he became even more distraught. ‘At the least noise,’ wrote Truchsess-Waldburg, ‘he started up in terror and changed colour.’
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It was after this that he decided to put on a mixture of uniforms – an Austrian uniform given to him by Köller, a Prussian forage cap given to him by Truchsess-Waldburg and a cloak donated by Shuvalov, a motley collection of the clothes of the armies that had defeated him. He adopted the name of Lord Burghersh, the British military commissioner to the Allies. To make the subterfuge appear even more authentic, he rode in a carriage with Köller, insisting Köller whistle a tune every time they rode into a town or village, and that the coachman smoke (neither habit would have been allowed normally in the presence of the Emperor).
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The Emperor was without his clothes, naked before friend and foe. It was quite uncharacteristic of him since he was, as we know, courageous in battle. What he obviously feared above all was the angry mob, a throwback perhaps to the days when he had seen what it was capable of at the Tuileries in 1792. After Aix, he began to feel safer and adopted a more imperious manner, which made his shameful exhibition even more humiliating. What he eventually concluded from this show of hostility was that the Midi had been stirred up by the provisional government, but that on the whole the French were still favourable to him.
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In other words, he refused to admit that his own government had done wrong.

He met his sister Pauline on 26 April in a large country house, the Château du Bouillidou, near the town of Le Luc. They embraced, shed a few tears and spent the next four hours together in private.
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She was the only sibling to bother trying to see her brother, and perhaps the only one who felt affection for him. Not even his mother made an attempt to see him, although they had passed each other near Auxerre. With the collapse of the Empire, his brothers and sisters now found it prudent to flee and to keep a low profile. Caroline was busy with Murat in Naples intriguing to stay in power. Elisa was obliged to leave Lucca in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany followed by a mob that insulted her along the way. She is reported to have stuck her head out of the carriage, pointed a threatening finger at them and shouted, ‘I’ll be back, you rabble’ (
Je reviendrai, canailles
).
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She was never to return. Joseph found asylum in Switzerland. Lucien tried to leave for America but was arrested by the English and interned, first on Malta and then in England. While there he wrote an epic poem entitled
Charlemagne ou l’Eglise delivrée
(Charlemagne or the Church delivered). It had little to do with Charlemagne and a great deal more to do with his brother, harking back to the perennial problem of Napoleon’s succession. It was a way of criticizing the regime, the last jibe of a brother who had become anti-Napoleon.

Napoleon had in fact stopped in the region fifteen years before, on his return from Egypt, when he had borrowed a carriage from the owner of the Château du Bouillidou, which he subsequently failed to return. Now the mistress of the house apparently barged her way into his presence to remonstrate with him, but refused to believe, at first, that she was before the Emperor, so oddly dressed was he. The next morning, 27 April, they set off again, escorted by two squadrons of Austrian hussars that were stationed at Le Luc. The escort enabled Napoleon to change back into his own clothes; they arrived at Fréjus, a change of itinerary at Napoleon’s insistence, early that afternoon. The original destination had been Saint-Tropez, but Napoleon had wanted to spend what might have been his last night in France at the Chapeau Rouge, an inn at Fréjus where, fifteen years earlier, he had stayed the night after landing there from Egypt to launch his remarkable political career. Now he spent a couple of days there, most of which was passed in his room, where he ‘walked rapidly up and down’, occasionally appearing at the window ‘to watch some frigates arriving at anchorage’.
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