‘Quand serez-vous sage?
‘Quand je ne serai plus dans cette île. Mais je le deviendrai après avoir passé la ligne.
‘Lorsque je débarquerai en france, je serai très content. Ma femme viendra près de moi, mon fils sera grand et fort, il pourra boire sa bouteille de vin à dîner, je trinquerai avec lui. Ma mère sera vieille, mes sœurs seront laides, ce qui ne leur sera pas agréable, elles seront toujours coquettes, car les femmes se croient toujours jolies.’
‘When will you be wise?
‘Never [then that] as long as I [should] could be in this isle, but I shall become vise after [have] having passed the line. When I shall [landed] land in france I shall be very content. Mi [wive] wife shall come [after, bef-] near me. Mi son shall be great and [fort] strong. He [shall get] will be able to take his bottle of wine at dinner. I shall trink with him. Mi mother shall be olde, mi sisters shall ... for the women believe they....’
The pronoun I is uniformly written j. The corrections are mostly inserted above the line, but some are a continuation of the line, showing that the translation was written in Madame Bertrand’s presence. The first sentence, it is evident, had been playfully uttered by her on account of Napoleon’s teasing her for being boisterously gay; for it is the question addressed to obstreperous or fretful children, and Napoleon himself used to say to Betsy Balcombe, ‘Quand seras-tu sage?’ Sage does not here mean wise, but good or well behaved. Madame Bertrand passed over this and some other obvious blunders, either because her own English was defective, or because she would not discourage her pupil by too many corrections. At one corner of the sheet is a rude drawing of a ship, the imaginary ship in which Napoleon was to return to France, and in another corner is a sketch apparently meant for a line of muskets extended for firing. There are also the words, ‘Qui vous a apporté cette lettre? (Who has brought you this letter?) The writing is small and cramped, but fairly legible; much more so than other specimens at the exhibition, such as the audit of Napoleon’s accounts. The allegation that he wrote a scrawl to conceal his bad spelling seems far-fetched. Like many people, he had a hasty scrawl for drafts, which he was sometimes himself unable to decipher, and a plainer hand for his correspondents.
To quote from Manzoni’s famous ode:—
‘He vanished, in a narrow isle
His vacant days to keep,
Object of boundless envy once,