thirty-three-year-old Marquis Charles Tristan de Montholon was always
an unlikely Bonapartist. So far from being a distinguished soldier, he was
a coward who habitually shirked military service under the pretext of
various 'illnesses' and managed to avoid the sound of gunfire entirely
during the Hundred Days. But Montholon had an attractive wife who
was quite willing to live on St Helena and that may have been the main
reason Napoleon chose him; he was not a man to live for long periods
without female company, and at Malmaison he had already turned down
the offer by the gallant and loyal Marie Walewska to share his fortunes
wherever he went.
Napoleon also had permission to take twelve servants with him to the
South Atlantic. As chief valet he chose a young man named Louis
Marchand, just twenty-four, who turned out to be discreet, adroit,
shrewd and observant. A kindly soul, gifted with abundant commonsense
and refined feelings, loyal, devoted, modest and disinterested, Marchand
was the living refutation of the old saw that no man is a hero to his valet;
he idolized the Emperor. His assistant St-Denis was a kind of lesser
Marchand. Cipriani the butler was another who won golden opinions
fr om Napoleon. Another valet, the Switzer named Noveraz, Santini,
factotum and keeper of the purse, Ali a Mameluke bodyguard, three
footmen (Gentilini and the brothers Archambault), a pantryman (Pier
ron), a cook (Lepage) and a Iampman (Rousseau) completed the
complement of Bonaparte's retainers.
A further addition to the Emperor's personal staff was Dr Barry
O'Meara, a ship's surgeon on the Bellerophon, who was appointed the
Emperor's physician when Dr Maingault refused to accompany Napoleon
to St Helena. O'Meara was given permission by the Admiralty to take the
position provided he acted as a spy within the imperial household. But it
appears that O'Meara soon 'went native': he became a double agent at
best, but the intelligence he provided the British was worthless and the
advice he gave Napoleon was good. Out of the sixteen souls accredited to
Bonaparte's 'court' in St Helena, no less than seven left memoirs of
varying worth (Bertrand, Montholon, Gourgaud, Las Cases, Marchand,
St-Denis and O'Meara). Since British official records draw heavily on
what was told to the Governor of St Helena by these eyewitnesses, the
unenviable task for any historian of Napoleon on St Helena is to make
sense of their conflicting accounts.
The Northumberland slowly made its way south on the great Atlantic
swells. Napoleon's usual luck aboard ship held, for there were no storms
in the expected latitudes, and the voyage was uneventful. The ship was
off Funchal on 24 August and three days later Gomera in the Canaries
marcin
(Marcin)
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