Of regular residences Napoleon may be said to have had three in the island of Elba: the Mulini in Portoferraio, the country-house at St. Martino, and a house at Longone. The Mulini is a small, two-storeyed house, with a garden behind it, and a winding path leading down to the sea; the path ends in a little grotto known as “Napoleon’s bath.” The Emperor occupied the lower storey, giving the upper one, which he himself had built on, to his sister Pauline. No trace of the illustrious occupant now remains: the furniture has been entirely removed, some of it, as in the case of a bed in my possession, having left the island altogether; even the library, presented by Napoleon to the town, and lodged in the town-hall, has been to a great extent scattered, owing to the carelessness of the municipal authorities. Only one tangible record of the Emperor remains: the bronze mask in the chapel of the Misericordia. Antonmarchi, Napoleon’s doctor, made in Paris three bronze masks from the plaster cast which he had taken immediately after the death in St. Helena. One of these masks passed through the Murat family into the hands of the sculptor, Hiram Powers, in Florence, and is now[16] exposed for sale in London. The second I have not been able to trace. The third is at Portoferraio, kept in a handsome sarcophagus, and exposed to the public gaze every 5th of May, when a funeral service is performed over it. The face, as shown by the mask, is thin and drawn, the brow heavy and projecting; the likeness to the bust of Julius Cæsar in the British Museum is quite extraordinary.
Napoleon’s country-house at St. Martino lies in the fold of the hills west of Portoferraio. The building of it enabled him to play to perfection the rôle he had determined to adopt. He bought up the ground from the small proprietors who owned it, respecting, however, the rights of one old woman who refused to sell; and as soon as the works were well under way was continually to be seen riding along the road from Portoferraio to inspect their progress, supervising everything, chatting with everybody, talking to the children and giving them money. A tree is still shown which he is said to have planted with his own hand. Round the house, which was quite small, is a wood with fine old ilex-trees through which a path leads to the spring at which Napoleon loved to drink, and to the right rises a hill which the peasants still call the hill of sighs, because, they say, Napoleon used to go up there to sigh for his beloved France. The Emperor’s bedroom has been preserved intact, with its pretty decorations and its charming Empire furniture. Near the bed are two windows, of which one, just at the level of the eyes of a person lying there, opens on to a superb view of Portoferraio, the sea and neighbouring coast-line.
The house within the fort at Longone is now as bare as that at Portoferraio. The place, however, is interesting, for it was with the excuse of repairing the fortifications there that the Emperor supplied himself with guns and ammunition; while the ostensible sale, at Genoa, Leghorn, and other places, of the old iron found in the fort, afforded him an additional means of communication with the Continent. He was very frequently at Longone while maturing the final details of his escape.
Notwithstanding his apparent affability towards the Elbans, intended, we must believe, rather to mislead outsiders than the people themselves, Napoleon was not popular in the island. Being in continual want of money he was obliged to tax the people beyond their resources; and they naturally saw clearly that, whatever he might say and however condescending he might show himself, the money he drew from them was by no manner of means applied to the improvement of their position. His tax-gatherers were insulted; riots took place in the very churches when the priests gave out the date by which the taxes were to be sent in; in one village troops were billeted on the inhabitants until the last penny should be paid. The cries of “Vive l’Empereur!” which had originally greeted him on his various expeditions, ceased to be heard.
Before matters reached a veritable climax, however, Napoleon had played out his part, and had left the island in which he had landed with so many fine promises. He had shown himself a clever actor, a skilful intriguer to the outside world of European diplomacy; debauched, tyrannical and exacting to the inner Elban world, into which foreign diplomats could pry with difficulty. In his vices, in his astuteness, in his ambition, Napoleon, as he revealed himself in the island of Elba, moves backwards through history, and takes his place beside the Borgia, the Orsini, the Medici of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
Of the caricatures of the period the most interesting is the grimly ingenious German portrait of the Conqueror, to which the following explanation is attached: The hat is the Russian eagle which has gripped with its talons and will not leave go; the face is composed of the bodies of some of the thousands he has sacrificed to his ambition; the collar is the torrent of blood shed for his vain-glory; the coat is a bit of the map of the confederation arrayed against him and of his lost battlefields. On his shoulder, in the guise of an epaulet, is the great hand of God, which plucks the cobweb and destroys the spider that fills the place where a heart should have been.
FUGITIVE PIECES