him or bring him to trial. And trial for what? Waging war to retain the
natural frontiers could by no stretch of the imagination be considered a
cnme.
Elba, then, was the Czar's choice. Some residual regard for the man he
once briefly called his friend may have entered into the choice, but mostly
it was sheer machiavellianism: on Elba Napoleon was a constant thorn in
the side of Austrian Italy, so the Habsburgs could be kept occupied while
Alexander gave himself a free hand in Poland. Neither Metternich nor
Castlereagh liked the idea of Napoleon as sovereign of Elba and partly
discerned the Czar's motives; in the end Castlereagh refused to sign the
treaty, though Metternich reluctantly did.
There were six days between Napoleon's abdication and the arrival of
the draft treaty of Fontainebleau, which he would have to sign. Once
again he was sunk in gloom, immobilized by depression. He seemed
unable to decide whether he wanted Marie-Louise with him or not.
There was something inherently absurd about the events in the week
after his abdication, with him in Fontainebleau and his wife in Blois, just
one hundred miles to the south-west. She very early threw out a broad
hint that she wanted to join him: 'I would be braver and calmer if I were
sharing your fate and consoling you for all your setbacks,' she wrote. But
the reply was a somewhat charmless directive to pay out money from the
Treasury to his grasping family: a million francs each for Madame Mere,
Louis, Jerome, Pauline and Elisa; once they received their money, the
Bonapartes decamped, unconcerned about the Empress. But still there
was no definite word from the Emperor: 'I am sorry to have nothing left
but to have you share my evil fortunes,' he wrote on 8 April.
When they arrived in Blois, Joseph and Jerome tried to persuade
Marie-Louise to surrender to the first Austrian patrol. She resisted the
pressure and, once Joseph had got his share of the Treasury handout, he
departed for Switzerland. On 8 April she made her position explicit: 'I
am awaiting orders from you, and I do beseech you to let me come.'
Napoleon's answer was disappointingly offhand: 'You can come here if
you like ... or you could stay there.' In the light of this incoherent,
muddled and evasive advice, it seems bizarre that Napoleon was able to
write to Meneval, the Empress's secretary, on 10 April: 'Try to find out
the real intentions of the Empress and to discover whether she prefers to
follow the Emperor ... or to retire, either to a State which would be
given to her, or to the Court of her father, together with my son.' The
answer was clear enough in all her daily letters: 'You must send someone
to tell me what to do ... No one loves you as much as your faithful
Louise.'
marcin
(Marcin)
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