Books: Old Soldier’s Last Home

THE LAST YEARS OF NAPOLEON (429 pp.) — Ralph Korngold — Harcourt, Brace ($6.75).

The island is a bleak South Atlantic rock ten miles long and seven miles wide. Eight months of the year it rains, three months the sun blazes down, one month it is bearable. Of 600 officers and men of H.M.S. Conqueror, stationed at the island in the early 19th century, more than 100 died in an 18-month period of hepatitis and amoebic dysentery. A rat-infested house on the atherapeutic isle served as prison for the man who had marched vast armies from Moscow to Madrid, and once ruled half the Christian world. Only a few years before, Napoleon had unwittingly forecast his fate: “It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous.”

The life of Napoleon and his retinue on St. Helena is a kind of tragicomic parody of those scenes in Shakespeare where the king moves his court to some enchanted forest to frolic and philosophize. In a graphic, day-by-day account of the exile years, Historian Ralph Korngold reveals the constant bickering and backbiting of the Napoleonic entourage. Napoleon himself, argues Korngold, may have been hounded to a premature death by the erratic restrictions and petty cruelties of the British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, a fussy, indecisive simpleton.

Mail Call. Napoleon took an immediate dislike to Lowe (“a most villainous face”) and regularly called him a “hired assassin” with “hyena’s eyes.” Lowe insisted that Napoleon be referred to as “General Bonaparte”; Napoleon insisted that he was the “Emperor Napoleon,” and refused to accept his mail or his own doctor’s reports unless so addressed. When

Lowe had the mail thrown on Napoleon’s table, Napoleon barred his doors and threatened to make a corpse of any British officer who broke them down. None did. While the British themselves were spending £250,000 a year to guard Napoleon, Lowe was ordered to cut Bonaparte’s household from £18,000 to £8,000. Napoleon promptly had his table silver pounded into a shapeless mass, weighed and sold openly in town. Vindictively Lowe restricted Napoleon to a shadeless plain for horseback riding, and forbade him to enter his own garden after dusk.

Apart from Lowe’s plaguy tactics. Napoleon’s own skeleton court was a prickly lot. Three officers and a secretary—Marshal Bertrand, Count de Montholon, General Gourgaud, Count Las Cases—had accompanied him into exile out of mixed motives of avarice, reflected glory and—last and least—devotion. It was believed that Napoleon had 6,000,000 francs in Europe (he actually had half of that). Bertrand was perhaps the least self-seeking, but he lost status when Mme. Bertrand refused to become Napoleon’s mistress. With or without the hint, Mme. de Montholon was a wily enough schemer to indulge the fallen emperor, and the Montholons got their reward: 2,000,000 francs in Napoleon’s will.

Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity’s avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud’s statement that if Las Cases tried to go in to dinner ahead of him again, he would kick him.

Dinner and what followed were usually the most taxing of rituals. At 5 p.m., everyone assembled in the dining room at Longwood, Napoleon’s home, officers in dress uniform, ladies in low-cut gowns. Napoleon bolted his food, and often ate with his hands. After dinner, there were games. If the game was chess, the officers had to stand throughout, and Napoleon almost invariably lost unless the other player sycophantically threw the game. At other times, Napoleon read aloud from Racine, Corneille and Moliere. Sometimes he held the little band spellbound with accounts of his great campaigns. After one such evening, he stared into space and said: “After all, what a romance my life has been.”

The last days on St. Helena had little romance. Defections and deportations had riddled his last command. He was in agony, either from stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but his doctors were too incompetent to diagnose his case. At dawn on May 5, 1821, with his mind wandering, Napoleon said, “Who retreats?”, then: “At the head of the army.” They were his last words.