spending too much time with his wife and family, Montholon was put in
charge of the household. Bertrand felt this an infringement of his
prerogatives and brooded, but Gourgaud was more of a fighter. By this
time it was obvious that Napoleon had made the pert and pretty Albine
de Montholon his mistress, with Montholon himself as pander. Scholars
have sometimes objected that there is no direct evidence of this liaison
but, even if Napoleon was not a compulsive womanizer and we could in
all seriousness imagine him content with a sexless, monastic existence,
there is much at Longwood that cannot be explained otherwise. In his
diary entry of rs December r8r6 Gourgaud unwittingly provided clear
evidence of the affair. And it was Albine's hold over the Emperor that
provoked Gourgaud to challenge Montholon to a duel. Montholon, a
noted physical coward, ducked the challenge but complained to the
Emperor that Gourgaud was unbalanced. He instituted an effective
whispering campaign against Gourgaud, just as he had done earlier with
Las Cases, but showed his moral imbecility by also disparaging the
Emperor behind his back to Gourgaud.
By the end of r8r7 Napoleon had had enough of Gourgaud. His
follower's easy relations with Hudson Lowe, the constant battling with
Montholon and his jealous rages pushed the Emperor to snapping point.
Gourgaud himself records a dressing-down he received when his hero
accused him of sulking like a woman. Napoleon said if he had known
what life at Longwood was going to be like, he would have brought only
servants, for talking to a parrot was preferable to dealing with his
temperamental courtiers. Poignantly he expressed to Gourgaud some of
the anguish that usually lay hidden: 'Don't you think that when I wake in
the night I don't have dark moments, when I remember what I was and
what I am now?' But Gourgaud threatened to leave his service once too
often, and finally Napoleon took him at his word.
Once in London, Gourgaud acted the role of great betrayer. He met
Bathurst and the French and Russian ambassadors and popularized three
blatant lies. He asserted that Napoleon had an immense treasure of gold
and silver at Longwood and could escape from St Helena whenever he
chose. Even worse, although he had himself been ill on the island, he
claimed that St Helena had a healthy climate, and that Napoleon's
illnesses were purely diplomatic, an obvious ploy to gain sympathy in
Europe. Bathurst pounced on these admissions and used them to
persuade the Allies at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle to confirm the
conditions of Napoleon's detention. Although Gourgaud later recanted
and wrote high-flown appeals to the Czar and Marie-Louise to get the
marcin
(Marcin)
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