Military Attaché to the Russian army invading France. He had survived battles in Spain, but at Fère-Champenoise he was mistaken by an over-enthusiastic Cossack for a French officer and savagely wounded.
He survived his wounds and was appointed British Commissioner to His Highness the Emperor Napoleon, ruler of Elba. Lord Castlereagh stressed that Sir Neil was not the Emperor’s jailer, but of course part of his job was to keep a close eye on Napoleon. Yet Sir Neil had been lulled, and in February 1815, while the Inconstant was being disguised as a British ship, he told the Emperor that he needed to sail to Italy to consult with his doctor. That may well have been true, but it is also true that Signora Bartoli, Sir Neil’s mistress, lived in Leghorn, and that is where he sailed.
The Emperor wished Sir Neil well and hoped he would return by the end of the month because the Princess Borghese was giving a ball, and Sir Neil promised he would do his best to attend. The Princess Borghese was Napoleon’s beguiling sister, the lovely Pauline, who had joined her brother in exile. Penury had forced the sale of her lavish house in Paris, which had been purchased by the British government for use as their embassy. That meant that for five months it had been home to the Duke of Wellington, who had been appointed Britain’s ambassador to the court of Louis XVIII. The house, on the rue du Faubourg St-Honoré, is a jewel, and is still Britain’s embassy.
Sir Neil sailed to Leghorn in the Royal Navy brig Partridge, which usually blockaded Elba’s main harbour. With the Partridge flown the Emperor could put his plans into effect and on 26 February his small fleet sailed for France with just 1,026 troops, 40 horses and 2 cannon. The voyage lasted two days and on 28 February the Emperor landed in France again. He led a puny army, but Napoleon was nothing if not confident. ‘I will arrive in Paris’, he told his troops, ‘without firing a shot!’
The peace was over, struck by a thunderbolt.
* * *
During the winter of 1814 to 1815 many women in Paris wore violet-coloured dresses. It was not just fashion, but rather a code which suggested that the violet would return in the spring. The violet was Napoleon. His beloved Josephine had carried violets at their wedding, and he sent her a bouquet of the flowers on every anniversary. Before his exile to Elba he had said he would be modest, like the violet. Everyone in Paris knew what the colour violet represented, and if at first the French had been relieved that the Emperor was dethroned and that the long destructive wars were over, they soon found much to dislike in the Emperor’s replacement. The restored monarchy, under the grossly obese Louis XVIII, proved rapacious and unpopular.
Then the violet returned. Most people expected that the Royalist army would swiftly defeat Napoleon’s risible little force, but instead the King’s troops deserted in droves to the returned Emperor and within days French newspapers were printing a witty description of his triumphant journey. There are various versions, but this one is typical:
The Tiger has left his den.
The Ogre has been three days at sea.
The Wretch has landed at Fréjus.
The Buzzard has reached Antibes.
The Invader has arrived at Grenoble.
The Tyrant has entered Lyon.
The Usurper has been glimpsed fifty miles from Paris.
Tomorrow Napoleon will be at our gates!
The Emperor will proceed to the Tuileries today.
His Imperial Majesty will address his loyal subjects tomorrow.
His Imperial Majesty, Napoleon Bonaparte, was forty-six years old as he entered the Tuileries Palace in Paris, where an excited crowd awaited his arrival. They had been gathered for hours. The King, fat Louis XVIII, had fled Paris, going to Ghent in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the carpet of his abandoned throne room was tufted with embroidered crowns. Someone in the waiting crowd gave one of the crowns a dismissive kick and so loosened it to reveal that the royal tuft hid a woven bee. The honey-bee was another of Napoleon’s symbols, and the excited crowd went to its knees to tear off the crowns, thus restoring the carpet to its old imperial splendour.
It was evening before Napoleon arrived at the palace. The waiting crowd could hear the cheering getting closer, then came the clatter of hoofs on the forecourt and finally the Emperor was there, being carried shoulder-high up the stairs to the audience chamber. An eyewitness said ‘his eyes were closed, his hands reaching forward like a blind man’s, his happiness betrayed only by his smile’.
What a journey it had been! Not just from Elba, but from Napoleon’s unpromising birth in 1769 (the same year as the Duke of Wellington’s birth). He was christened Nabulion Buonaparte, a name that betrays his Corsican origin. His family, which claimed noble lineage, was impoverished and the young Nabulion flirted with those Corsicans who plotted for independence from France and even thought of joining Britain’s Royal Navy, France’s most formidable foe. Instead he emigrated to France, frenchified his name and joined the army. In 1792 he was a Lieutenant, a year later, aged twenty-four, a Brigadier-General.
There is a famous painting of the young Napoleon crossing the St Bernard Pass on his way to the Italian campaign which rocketed him to fame. Louis David’s canvas shows him on a rearing horse, and everything about the painting is motion; the horse rears, its mouth open and eyes wide, its mane is wind-whipped, the sky is stormy and the General’s cloak is a lavish swirl of gale-driven colour. Yet in the centre of that frenzied paint is Napoleon’s calm face. He looks sullen and unsmiling, but above all, calm. That was what he demanded of the painter, and David delivered a picture of a man at home amidst chaos.
The man who was carried up the Tuileries staircase was much changed from the young hero who had possessed rock-star good looks. By 1814 the handsome, slim young man was gone, replaced by a pot-bellied, short-haired figure with sallow skin and very small hands and feet. He was not tall, a little over five foot seven inches, but he was still hypnotic. This was the man who had risen to dominate all Europe, a man who had conquered and lost an empire, who had redrawn the maps, remade the constitution and rewritten the laws of France. He was supremely intelligent, quick-witted, easily bored, but rarely vengeful. The world would not see his like again until the twentieth century, but unlike Mao or Hitler or Stalin, Napoleon was not a murderous tyrant, although like them he was a man who changed history.
He was a superb administrator, but that was not how he wanted to be remembered. Above all, he was a warlord. His idol was Alexander the Great. In the middle of the nineteenth century, in the American Civil War, Robert E. Lee, the great Confederate General, watched his troops executing a brilliant and battle-winning manoeuvre and said, memorably, ‘It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.’ Napoleon had grown too fond of it, he loved war. Perhaps it was his first love, because it combined the excitement of supreme risk with the joy of victory. He had the incisive mind of a great strategist, yet when the marching was done and the enemy was outflanked he still demanded enormous sacrifices of his men. After Austerlitz, when one of his generals lamented the French lying dead on that frozen battlefield, the Emperor retorted that ‘the women of Paris can replace those men in one night’. When Metternich, the clever Austrian Foreign Minister, offered Napoleon honourable peace terms in 1813 and reminded the Emperor of the human cost of refusal, he received the scornful answer that Napoleon would happily sacrifice a million men to gain his ambitions. Napoleon was careless with the lives of his troops, yet his soldiers adored him because he had the common touch. He knew how to speak to them, how to jest with them and how to inspire them. His soldiers might adore him, but his generals feared him. Marshal Augereau, a foul-mouthed disciplinarian, said, ‘This little bastard of a general actually scares me!’, and General Vandamme, a hard man, said he ‘trembled like a child’ when he approached Napoleon. Yet Napoleon led them all to glory. That was his drug, la Gloire! And in search of it he broke peace treaty after peace treaty, and his armies marched beneath their Eagle standards from Madrid to Moscow, from the Baltic to the Red Sea. He astonished