Letters From St. Helena

Letters From St. Helena

It was here, at the age of fifty-one, that Napoleon Bonaparte sat for his final repose-exiled by those he'd made paupers and abandoned by those he'd made Kings. His jaw is set in the manner of a beaten man, his eyes empty and downcast, haunted by the intermittent insanity that had plagued him since the Battle of Philadelphia six years prior.



But as eminent historian Terrance Aston sets forth in his stunning new translation of the Lettres de la Ste-Hélène, it is a countenance born of habit, not mood. For as the sun set on his life (he would expire a mere two months later) and his ultimate defeat became certain in the minds of his foes, the first Emperor of the modern age was equally evinced of his ultimate victory.

In this concise but unabridged compilation of Napoleon's most important letters and journal entries, Professor Aston delves deeply into the principles, passions and psychosis that drove one of history's great captains and, in a larger sense, reshaped the political, social and ideological landscape of Europe. Rich with analysis and telling documents not found in the original Lettres, including the famous Notes de l'instruction written by an ailing Bonaparte to his young son, the Duke of Reichstadt, the book seeks to arrest a complete portrait of the Napoleonic era and the personal demons that defined it.

Other Books by Terrance Aston
Peter the Great
Frederick's Prussia
The Sun King
A Republic in Blood: The French Revolution

Novels by Terrance Aston
Wlak Farm

About the Author
Terrance Aston was born in London on April 19th, 1947. Educated at Oxford, reading first for the Law and then for History, he assumed a faculty position at King's College in 1983. His first two books, The Sun King and A Republic in Blood, focused wholly on France, his primary area of study. In 1989 he published Peter the Great and in 1994 Frederick's Prussia, shifting his attention to the titans of Eastern Europe. Four years later, having devoted himself solely to fiction, Professor Aston's first novel, Wlak Farm, was released in the states. Its darkly satiric portrayal of a herd of Wlaks turned Marxist-Leninists and the opportunistic Porkwlaks who destroy their utopia in the name of personal power and greed was a critical and popular success, and underscored the author's own opinion of the French revolution. His return to nonfiction in 2000 heralded the recent publication of Letters From St. Helena and promises more exposes of French history in the future.

He currently resides with his pet Wlak, nicknamed Napoleon (who, he contends, is not allowed to sleep in the house), and is working on a biography of the infamous Blu Morte assassin and serial killer who ravaged central France in the early 15th century.

Preface
The first Monday of what had been erroneously described as the new millennium was drearily chilly, filling me with both personal and existential dread as I stared moodily out the picture windows in John Bentley's London office. Though it was a misnomer and irrelevant besides, I felt strangely on the cusp of something new myself, as a writer and grudging member of the human species, and got the impression from the glum sky and soggy streets that it would be terribly unpleasant. Couldn't help it-Nabakov be damned.

John Bentley was and continues to be my editor, solely because he worked on my first book when we were both mites in the publishing industry and feels insurmountable guilt for leaving mitedom behind. Apparently, he finds the idea of frantically scribbling during coffee breaks and on subways and in the flickering light of hanging bulbs while struggling desperately to keep the hideaway bed from crashing down and embarrassing one's date tremendously appealing and wonderfully real. But he also finds the reallity of taking the Concord to New York for lunch and giving one's date a choice of bedrooms tremendously appealing and wonderfully enjoyable-so he lives vicariously through me. Insulting, yes, but he's a damn fine editor.

We were meeting to discuss my next project-a piece of experimental history exploring the relationship between Louis XIV's unwillingness to use eating utensils and the War of Spanish Succession-and from the dour expression on his face I surmised that he was beginning to regret leading two lives. Understandable, as after taking four years to write a ninety page novel and another two to craft a sequel on the farm's evolutionary politics that almost managed to see the light of day I was beginning to regret leading one.

I had just finished rereading the 1947 edition of Lettres de la St. Helena in preparation for a section on the French revolution, and, as my mind frantically grasped at something to keep John on board, the relief of Napoleon painted in 1821 suddenly materialized before its rapidly blinking eye. Analysis of Bonaparte's well-documented but poorly understood motive for setting about conquering things as he did was sorely lacking, particularly in regard to the stunning defeats of 1815 and the progressive, occasionally lapsing mental deterioration to which they gave rise.

I had been grasping at straws for almost three minutes before John started gesticulating wildly, scrambling for the phone to call his boss and my agent (with whom I hadn't been on speaking terms for two decades). Two years later the final manuscript was finished and I felt strongly but strangely like invading Wales.

One hundred and eighty-one years after his death, Napoleon's magnetism continues to enthrall, enrage and incite. It is the dangerous mixture of political charisma and fascinating personality, indomitable will and infectious madness that to him drew Bertrand, the people of France, the army, the British admirals who escorted him from place to place and generations of revolutionaries and reactionaries alike. It was, aside from his stunning tactical acumen and strategic foresight, the fundamental reason for his enormous power. And his downfall.

For that persona served only to exacerbate the elements within him that had reared it-ambition, clarity of mind, arrogance, stubbornness, entitlement-and inflame the fear that bore it violently-anonymity.

Obscurity plagued Napoleon, particularly at the height of his fame and authority in 1815, and from it he was willing to flee even into death. He wrote, at St. Helena, "that it would've been best to die in the Kremlin, with reputation and legend unblemished." And so, his army and empire lost, he chose another to secure his final triumph.

Napoleon wrote over forty-thousand letters in his lifetime, a third of which in exile, and produced nineteen volumes of journal entries. The most important of them, however, were those detailing his raison d'être for and method of empire-building, those to Josephine and those to his only child. Letters From St. Helena contains the most prominent of these, unabridged, along with separate accounts written by those close to him, whether friends or enemies, and the history necessary to understand the intellectual and physical state of the Emperor at every stage of his life. It is, as yet, the only compendium of its kind. But it is far from the only compendium of Napoleon's life.

Save during the world wars, every year since 1900 has seen the production of books on Napoleonic France. Films, novels, plays-text and records and imaginings of every kind have served to sustain him even in death and keep him from obscurity. Two days before the end, Napoleon wrote Josephine, who was, he knew, long buried, "I shall live forever, dwelling in the hearts of men. And you, my love, shall dwell forever in mine. All for which I've wished is so, and I am victorious."

Time has, thus far, borne him out. Triumph was, even in death, his conquest of obscurity.

-Terrance Aston
London, 2002

OOC:

Ichabod-He sure will... And then, the most powerful man in Europe, he'll retire voluntarily to a chunk of godforsaken rock to write his memoirs. Going the way of Cincinnatus would certainly change the meaning of the term "Napoleon-complex."

MrT-If you're going to make something up, might as well make it impressive... Sort of what DW tells the ladies...

LD-Thanks... But is that akin to the guidance counselor response? "Lots of potential..."

DW-Yeah, I remember doing interpretative dance for Thus Spoke Zarawlak in college... The mountain bit was a nightmare-how do you convey "God is dead" by flailing your limbs?

Bloody academia...

OOC:

Some notes on style from now on:

-Letters will be set off in the text, but they'll also be italicized...

-I'm using the word "letters" in the strictest sense (and more particular to its meaning in French), to imply written works intended for or unveiled to public airing.

And MrT, sorry I missed this, but I have read Bertrand's diary and much of Napoleon's St. Helena writings... Thanks-and enjoy your licentious romp. I don't get mine until tommorow.

Part I: Of Island Birth

Introduction
On the Western boarder of the Tyrrhenian Sea there arises steeply and suddenly a mass of green and gray against the cobalt horizon. A seeming apparition, it shimmers like the mountain oases of Arabia, beset on all sides by rollicking blue dunes, white-capped in the winter and gentle, almost soft, in the spring and summer.

Its history is ancient and uneventful, and though resting at the geographic center of Western civilization it has forever been and remains largely remote and impenetrable to the West. Since the fifth century BC it has been subjugated and peopled by empires, kingdoms and barbarous tribes alike, passing from Phoenician traders to Greek colonists to Vandals. Those who have settled there, however, have been in turn subjugated, and grew to call themselves Corsicans, no matter from whence they hailed. Its mystique, therefore, has been preserved and its spirit is purely native.

At all but a single, fleeting moment, the isle of Corsica has borne the conquered and inward-gazing, never a race desirous of venturing to other lands for glory or bounty, and certainly not a conqueror. She was a province, most recently of the Moors, the Papacy and Genoa, relegated to obscurity, doomed to be but one of many squares on the chess board of Europe. History shaped and shuffled her, save on two days that together allowed that she might, for the first and only time, shape it.

The purchase of Corsica by King Louis XV in 1768 was a trifling matter to both parties, Genoa and France, that had a hand in it. For years the perennial revolution of Corsican nationalist Pasquale Paoli had sapped the already declining resources of the Italian city-state, requiring repeated French intervention that, in sum, cost more than the island produced between Giacinto Paoli's exile in 1735 and the cession thirty-three years later. The King, well-aware of the impossibility of full repayment, forgave all debts and paid a pittance for the island that had been Genoese, with brief interruptions, for five centuries.

At the time Corsica was ruled by a republican government, of which Paoli was President, and its constitution of 1762 has been credited as one of the defining influences over James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Though short-lived, the regime fostered the construction of schools, roads and public buildings, as well as, importantly, the rise of representative, democratic assemblage as a political ideal. All were to play a key role in Napoleon's military and political schooling and the 1789 Declaration.

Prominent in the nationalist movement and these efforts was one Carlo Buonaparte and his strikingly beautiful wife, Letizia. Both members of the Corsican nobility and, in so impoverished a land, among its ruling families, their lineage would, upon admission to the noblesse, be traced back to the Florentine gentry of the eleventh century. The Buonapartes had resided on the island for two hundred years and had a long history of participation in violent uprisings and demagoguery.


Carlo Buonaparte


Letizia Buonaparte

After the cession, Carlo would become a chief lieutenant in Paoli's guerrilla resistance while Letizia, six months pregnant, wandered the mountains of the interior. Despite several initial victories, the Corsicans were decisively beaten at Ponte Nuovo in May of 1769, after which Paoli and his principle followers fled to England.

To the people of Corsica and the fate of Europe, the purchase and subsequent subordination were not trifles. Many of those who were received as heroes in London, thanks in large part to the writer James Boswell, had served as the foundation of the independence movement, and when the vast majority died prior to it or failed to return after amnesty was granted by the revolutionary government of France the nationalist spirit, though pervasive, was essentially dead.

More importantly, however, it meant that Carlo and Letizia's son, named for a cousin killed in action against the invaders, would be born Napoleon Bonaparte, a citizen of France.

OOC:

Sharur- One of these days Terrance will have to write some of that biography of the Blu Morte... I anticipate a chapter entitled, "Scherer In His Bedroom."

Sorcerer-I thought about adding a copy-page replete with an imaginary publishing house and LoC number, but gin'll do that to you...

Wasa-Thanks... The move from "promising" to "very, very good," is heartening.

The setup should be completed by midweek, at which time I'll get down to the business of recording Napoleon's hobby...