His restless energies found some employment in the affairs of his little kingdom, and in the planning of all sorts of improvements upon which he lavished freely the funds he had brought from France. With Pauline’s money he bought a country-seat, where he spent much time, and where he could occasionally be seen helping to feed the chickens.
His mother had come and his sister, but where was wife and child? The allied sovereigns had pledged themselves by formal treaty to send Maria Louisa to him under escort, and the promise had been broken. Wife and child had been enveloped with hostile influences, kept well out of his reach, hastened from France, and carried to Vienna.
Historians gloss over the intrigue which followed—as foul a conspiracy against human virtue and sacred human relations as ever soiled the records of the human race.
The Emperor Francis of Austria and Metternich, his minister, were determined that Maria Louisa should never rejoin her husband, treaty or no treaty. They knew her character, and for his daughter the royal father laid the most infamous snare. He deliberately encouraged Neipperg, an Austrian libertine of high degree; and Napoleon’s wife, entangled in the meshes of this filthy intrigue which had found her all too ready to yield, no longer wished to return to the husband she had betrayed.
No wonder the authors who gloat over Napoleon’s sins find no comfort here; and hurry on to other topics. They have made horrible accusations against him and his sister Pauline, on the mere word of a spiteful Madame de Rémusat, and of an unscrupulous liar like Fouché. But the accusations might be true, and nevertheless Napoleon would shine like a superior being beside such an exemplar of divine right as the Emperor Francis, who coldly and deliberately, as a matter of state policy, pushed his own daughter into the arms of a libertine!
We have read of the crimes of the vulgar, the canaille, the Marats, and the Héberts; does any page of modern history hold a story more sickening than this? Did any criminal of the vulgar herd stoop to depths more loathsome than Francis, Emperor “by the grace of God,” wallowed in?
After having broken their treaty upon the sacred subject of wife and child, the allied kings found it easy enough to violate it upon matters less important. They did not respect the property of the Bonaparte family as they had agreed; they did not pay the Bonaparte pensions; they did not bestow the principalities promised for Napoleon’s son; and they paid no respect to that provision of the compact which secured to Napoleon inviolably the island of Elba. Bitter personal enemies of the fallen Emperor, Pozzo di Borgo, Lord Wellington, Talleyrand, and others, agreed that he must be removed to a greater distance from Europe, St. Helena being the place which met with most favor. The fact that the allied kings had pledged themselves to allow him to remain at Elba, seems not to have entered into the discussions at all. He who had broken no treaties was already an outlaw in the counsels of those who had broken all: they could deal with him as they chose. “In the name of the most Holy Trinity” they had pledged faith to him; they could as easily breach the last treaty as its predecessors, being kings by the grace of God, and owing no fealty to ordinary moralities.
The British ministry began to negotiate with the East India Company for the island of St. Helena; and the purpose of the allied kings to send him there as a prisoner of war not only reached Napoleon at Elba, but actually found its way into the Moniteur, the official gazette of France.
The fact that Louis XVIII. did not pay one cent of the $400,000 which the Treaty of Fontainebleau had provided for Napoleon’s annual revenue, was of itself a source of serious embarrassment to him, justifying him in setting aside a contract which his enemies did not regard; but it had less to do with his movements, perhaps, than any other breach of the treaty. He cared nothing for money; little for personal luxury. “I can get along with one horse, and with a dollar a day,” he declared with democratic independence. Besides, he could easily have secured from Europe the sums he needed, as he himself publicly declared on his return to France. But when he found that his wife and child would never be surrendered; that Talleyrand and the Bourbons were still bent upon having him assassinated; that if he could not be killed he was to be taken away to a distant rock and held as a prisoner of war, the impulse became irresistible to make one desperate effort to escape the impending doom. Those who watched over his personal safety had already stopped, disarmed, and sent away two would-be assassins: who could tell whether the third would be stopped? It came to him that the Allies had agreed to send him to St. Helena: who could say when a British man-of-war might bear down upon little Elba? Brooding over his wrongs, and over the perils of his situation, Napoleon gave way to occasional bursts of anger, declaring that he would die the death of a soldier, arms in hand, before he would submit to the proposed removal.
A Scotchman of rank who visited Elba at this time wrote: “Bonaparte is in perfect health, but lodged in a worse house than the worst description of dwellings appropriated to our clergy in Scotland, yet still keeping up the state of Emperor, that is, he has certain officers with grand official names about him. We were first shown into a room where the only furniture was an old sofa and two rush-bottom chairs, and a lamp with two burners, only one of which was lighted. An aide-de-camp received us, who called a servant and said that one of the lights had gone out. The servant said it had never been lighted. ‘Light it, then,’ said the aide-de-camp. Upon which the servant begged to be excused, saying that the Emperor had given no orders upon the subject. We were then received by Bonaparte in an inner room. The Emperor wore a very old French Guard uniform with three orders, and had on very dirty boots, being just come in from his country house.”