A pilgrim has come to Malmaison. Wandering through Josephine’s gardens, he fancies he can see her fussing over her animals and tending her plants. Escaping from Elba was too easy. He had sailed away with fanfare, under the very noses of his captors, and made it to Paris to reclaim his empire without firing a shot. Being back here in Malmaison, however, is difficult.
‘I have sought death in numberless engagements,’ he had written after his abdication. ‘I can no longer dread its approach. I shall now hail it as a boon. Nevertheless, I could still wish to see Josephine once more.’1
In deep despair, he had contemplated suicide and, in what would be his last letter to Josephine, before leaving for Elba, wrote with evident bitterness, ‘I have heaped favours upon a countless number of wretches. What have they latterly done for me? They have all betrayed me, one and all, save and except the excellent Eugène, so worthy of you and me.’2
He concluded, ‘Adieu, my dear Josephine. Follow my example and be resigned. Never dismiss from your recollection one who has never forgotten, and will never forget you. Farewell, Josephine.’3
His first attempt at suicide, with poison, failed because the potion was too weak and merely made him violently ill. He then tried to shoot himself, but a servant had thoughtfully removed the powder from his pistol. There would be no third attempt. Thoughts of Josephine, of how it would devastate her, stayed his hand.
In his Memoirs from Beyond the Grave, the romantic novelist François-René de Chateaubriand paints a mournful picture:
‘Malmaison, where the Emperor rested, was empty. Josephine was dead. Bonaparte found himself alone in that retreat. There he had commenced his fortune. There he had been happy. There he had become intoxicated with the incense of the world. There, from the heart of his tomb, he issued orders that shook the world.
‘In those gardens, where formerly the feet of the crowd raked up the sanded walks, the grass and brambles grew green. I ascertained this while walking there. Already, for want of attention, the exotic trees were pining away. The black Australian swans no longer glided along the canals. The cages no longer held the tropical birds prisoner – they had flown away to await their host in their own country.’4
Of the animals from Josephine’s Ark, all that remain are seven goats, four hinds, a deer, a lemur, a llama, a sheep and one lonely kangaroo. The lucky ones will be bought by Friedrich of Württemberg to live out their days in his menagerie. The rest will end up as stuffed exhibits in a museum.
As for the black swans, Chateaubriand is correct to say they no longer glide along the canals at Malmaison, but that’s not to say they have perished. The descendants of Josephine’s first pair of black swans, brought to her by the Baudin expedition, have flown from Malmaison, and before long will be found in the wild throughout Europe.
Napoleon speaks with Josephine’s children, Hortense and Eugène, and others who were with her to the last. This is what they tell him:
In the past few months, to all outward appearance she was her usual ebullient self, but to those who knew her well it was a thin veneer. In quiet moments she confessed to a pervasive sadness and wondered if she might die of melancholy, and she feared for the health and safety of Napoleon, who was exiled on Elba.
When, out walking one day, she caught a cold, neither she nor anyone else thought anything of it. Even when, a day later, a rash spread on her arms and legs, she insisted on making the rounds of the gardens, but by the following evening her tongue had swelled up and she was burning with a fever. Doctors were called and prescribed bed rest and blistering, but she defied them. There were things to be done and visitors to entertain.
Only when she could carry on no longer did she take to her bed, and from then on her illness progressed so rapidly that soon she could barely speak and was clearly in considerable pain. The end, when it came, was swift and merciful. Hortense would recall, ‘When she saw us, she held out her arms with great emotion and uttered something we could not understand.’5
Within the hour, she was dead. It was pneumonia, the doctors said, but an autopsy would suggest cancer of the throat. Josephine’s chambermaid, Mademoiselle Avrillon, thought otherwise. Josephine, she said, had died of grief.
The pilgrim leaves Malmaison for the last time. He has a date with destiny in a cornfield in the Low Countries, near the village of Waterloo.