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Authors: Tom Keneally

Napoleon's Last Island

BOOK: Napoleon's Last Island
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About the Book

Keneally's gift, and his blessing to the many hundreds of characters he has created, is always to find the extraordinary within the ordinary

The Australian

 

When Tom Keneally discovered by chance at the National Gallery of Victoria that Betsy Balcombe, a young girl living on St Helena while the Emperor Napoleon was exiled there, had become the Emperor's ‘intimate friend and annoyer', and had then emigrated with her family to Australia, he was impelled to begin another extraordinary novel, exploring the intersection between the ordinary people of the world and those we deem exceptional.

Betsy Balcombe moved as a child with her family to St Helena, ‘that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile'. Ten years later her family befriended, served and were ruined by their relationship with Napoleon. To redeem their fortunes William Balcombe, Betsy's father, betrayed the Emperor and accepted a job as the colonial treasurer of New South Wales, taking his family with him. After enduring a profound tragedy on the voyage out, and never quite recovering from the results of his association with Napoleon, William's life deteriorated; however, his family struggled and survived in Australia.

Tom Keneally recreates Betsy's friendship with The Great Ogre, her enmities and alliances with his court, and her dramatic coming of age during her years with them on the island. With his ability for bringing historical stories to life in the most brilliant and surprising ways, Keneally vividly shares this remarkable tale and the beginning of an Australian dynasty.

Contents

Terre Napoléon

To me it was a discovery, though it was known to others. On a steely winter's day in 2012 I was ‘doing publicity' for a book of mine in the city of Melbourne and following a radio interview, the book publicist, a young veteran named Karen Reid, and I were offered tickets by the studio for an exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria. There we visited a collection of Napoleon's garments, uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, snuffboxes, military decorations and memorabilia.

Melbourne happens to be the capital city of the state of Victoria, but fourteen years before the queen honoured by that name was even born, a French naval explorer, Nicholas Baudin, sent to Australia by Napoleon, reached Sydney in a period of peace between the Great Powers, having surveyed the coast of the later-named Victoria and labelled it
Terre Napoléon
.

There is something ruthlessly enchanting about Napoleon. We are told he was a tyrant but we do not listen. We hear him labelled with the ‘Hitler' tag, but it does not take root. Counting in the blood and waste and all, the late phases of the French Revolution, the Consulate and then the Empire have an ineffable style, in ideas and new politics, in art and human venturing, which still compel our imaginations. Style in clothing, too. For there were women's garments (Josephine's and Marie-Louise's) in the exhibition and
I, like the Englishwomen of the island of St Helena when they saw the two exiles, Albine de Montholon and Fanny Bertrand, believed these could not have been reproduced by anyone who was not French and of that period. I was as bowled over by what I saw on the mannequins in the NGV as the population of St Helena was in 1815 by those two friends and companions of the exiled Emperor.

The furniture the Emperor and Josephine had commissioned from Jacob Frères, who might have come as close to heaven in their creations as any furniture-makers of history, was interspersed with porcelain and plate and paintings by Jacques-Louis David. We people of the globe's southernmost regions are used to going to Europe on interminable, brain-numbing flights to gawp at such items, but to be able to do it in Australia was a delight. For everything in here came from Europe, surely – that was my post-colonial assumption. It turned out not to be the case. Some of the material, including a
Légion d'honneur
, a swatch of the Emperor's hair, and a death mask of the man showing the mutilation of his head, were from an 1840s homestead named The Briars, located thirty kilometres away from Melbourne on the lovely Mornington Peninsula − a rectangular limb of earth that stretches south-east out of the city and ends in a narrow foot, which runs west to include Port Phillip Bay on its instep. That was where the Emperor's mask of mutilation came from!

And there, in the catalogue, was a name. Betsy Balcombe. Someone called Betsy was a familiar of the Emperor? And ended up in Australia? And her family had brought Napoleon relics with them, and the relics had been added to by a wealthy descendant.

So items from down the road had a connection with a young girl who had lived on St Helena when the Emperor was stuck on that high mid-Atlantic rock of exile, and who – it was said – had become his intimate friend and annoyer. On St Helena the Emperor specialised in giving people he liked enamelled snuffboxes and other mementos, including – in the case of the Balcombe family – a Sèvres plate painted with battle scenes. And the Balcombes, ultimately exiled themselves, to Australia, had
brought these memorabilia with them to O'Connell Street in Sydney and then into the Monaro bush and finally, with the most successful of the Balcombes, Betsy's youngest brother Alex, to the Port Phillip region.

Alex's robust and wealthy granddaughter Mabel Balcombe, who became a so-called leader of Melbourne society and was known as Dame Mabel Brookes − a woman born in 1890 and living until 1975 − had increased the collection by purchases made in Europe and elsewhere. And here were the Balcombe−Brookes items interspersed with those shipped especially from Europe for the exhibition. It may be worth mentioning that the husband of Dame Mabel, Norman Brookes, was the first non-resident Briton to win Wimbledon, and did it twice, in 1907 and on the lip of the conflagration in 1914. Sir Norman was a sportsman and sporting administrator, a businessman with financial and pastoral interests, an Anglophile and a supporter of private anti-Communist (that is, anti-malcontent) armies in the 1930s. That is, he should not have taken a shine to a man such as the Emperor. What did he have in common with the Emperor?

Before I proceed to tell my construction of the story of that lethal charming, I must emphasise I am not myself a person who has ever carried a torch for the Emperor Napoleon. On the one hand, he produced the
Code Napoléon
. He was not a tyrant in the notable way of Roman Caesars and totalitarian leaders, more an enlightenment man and man of destiny, but in the twentieth century we would discover the foul places men of destiny could take us. I am an Australian bush republican and was involved in the attempt to make Australia a republic by purely amiable and constitutional means. So the word ‘emperor' holds no allure for me, and I find Bonaparte's pretension of becoming an emperor to save the Republic preposterous. I was always surprised the idea was accepted with enthusiasm by the revolutionary French (though Napoleon's brother, brave Lucien, had his doubts).

But the story of the Emperor's friendship with a girl who ended up in Australia, with a family destroyed by its association with said Emperor, gripped me. Australia was the nether world
of the nineteenth century, as close to being another planet as was possible then. People, under a cloud in Europe, fetched up here or were sent – not convicts alone; two sons of Charles Dickens and one of Anthony Trollope, for example, plain non-academic Englishmen conveyed to a place where the rules were upside down and where even the feckless, it was believed, could find their fortune. The Balcombes were sent, damaged goods, from St Helena, with their Napoleon memorabilia, sentenced by no law court, but duped into it and conveniently excised from the main British polity. That's a tale!

So how can an aged Australian writer credibly render a girl − and a Georgian one too − with the justice and the affection that, having read her journal, no doubt flawed like all journals, I feel for her?

As strong as was the impetus that arose from my encounter with Betsy's journal, I felt impelled also by Surgeon Barry O'Meara's two volumes on the experience of being the Emperor's doctor and intimate. With his capacity for eloquence and palaver, his keen eye for the inhabitants of the island and his sense of grievance, burning with a furious vivid flame on the Emperor's behalf, O'Meara inveigled me.

The journals of the Emperor's friends on the island, Comte Las Cases, General Gourgaud, Comte de Montholon and that of the valet, Marchand, did not temper the fascination. Neither did the
Cahiers
of General Bertrand, nor the polished reports written by the Russian Count Balmain.

Secondary sources that tried to interpret the conundrum of Napoleon on St Helena include Desmond Gregory,
Napoleon's Jailer, Lt. General Sir Hudson Lowe
,
A Life and Clement Shorter
(ed.),
Napoleon and His Fellow Travellers
, and others too numerous to name.

This fiction purports to be a secret journal, the one hidden behind the real one published in 1844. Like Betsy's, it plays fast and loose with the strict historic chronology and suits its own convenience, but my no doubt mistaken intention is – in some way − to tell the truth by telling lies. I apologise to Betsy's lively ghost for my impudence.

And as a last waiver, I do not subscribe to the theory that Napoleon was murdered on St Helena by Comte de Montholon, or anyone else. One murder mystery less, however, still leaves space for the abundant mysteries of St Helena, the answers to some of which I have made guesses appropriate to the novel, and have still been left with plenty of others that defy explanation.

BOOK: Napoleon's Last Island
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