spoke of begging his bread from the British garrison, as one soldier from
others. Then he and Lowe became involved in a heated slanging match
about the merits of Lord Bathurst. Finally, the Emperor turned on him
with withering contempt: 'I've never seen you on any battlefield. You
were only good for hiring assassins.' Once again Lowe lost his composure
and stormed away angrily.
Napoleon and Lowe now settled in for a protracted cold war, the latter
determined to stick to the letter of every nugatory regulation that came
from the dreadful Bathurst, the former determined to extract the
maximum propaganda advantage from Lowe's mindless fo ibles. When, in
October 1816 , Lowe informed Montholon that French credit was
exhausted in Jamestown and in future the inhabitants of Longwood
would have to pay for their food supplies from their own pockets, the
Emperor pounced. In a tremendous propaganda coup Napoleon had his
silver plate broken up and sold to a jeweller in Jamestown, raising nearly
£zso on the first sale and roughly equal sums on two subsequent
occasions. The jeweller, Gideon Solomon, ostentatiously weighed the
silver fragments in a public display witnessed by British officers
embarking for England.
There was a similar incident involving supplies of wood. Napoleon,
with his mania for roaring fires and anyway combating excessive damp at
Longwood, complained about the niggardly ration of coal and wood. So
as not to be wrongfooted, Lowe doubled the allowance of coal but stated
that he could do nothing to increase the wood ration, as lumber was
scarce on the island. Napoleon then had some of his fu rniture, including
a bedstead and some shelves, broken up and used as firewood; he made
sure the story lost nothing in the telling in the hostelries of Jamestown.
But Lowe was guilty of his most spectacular idiocy over a marble bust of
Napoleon's son secretly sent out to St Helena. Lowe got to hear about the
clandestine import and impounded it, on the absurd grounds that a
marble bust might contain (where?) a secret message. O'Meara, in his
capacity as double agent, told Lowe that Napoleon knew about the bust,
was angry that it had been kept from him, and intended to turn the affair
to propaganda advantage. The wretched Lowe, fearful that he might have
done the wrong thing and be reprimanded by Bathurst, sent the bust up
to Longwood, where Napoleon gave it pride of place in his bedroom.
The conditions in which Napoleon was held on the island, the
decaying state of Longwood, infested with rats and plagued by dysentery,
the meanness and petty spite of Lowe and Bathurst, all these became the
subject of a public outcry in England in 1817. Despite all Lowe's
precautions, dozens of messages and bulletins reached the Fox fa mily at
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