I have tried to be true to the timeline of Napoléon’s escape from Elba, his landing in the south of France on the first of March, and his triumphant trek north to Paris. Word of the landing did reach King Louis XVIII on the fifth, but the Palace kept it quiet for two days. Napoléon really did order his troops to trail their muskets at the Laffrey Defile; he then dismounted and walked toward the King’s men to throw open his famous gray greatcoat and shout, “Here is your Emperor! Kill him if you wish!” (Different observers recorded his words with slight variations.)
He really did take Paris without firing a shot.
Kitty Wellington left Paris at six o’clock on the tenth of March, the Friday I have her leave with Hendon. There were indeed rumors that the King sent the crown jewels out of the country with her, although he did not; they left later with Baron Hüe. The Duke of Wellington was an awful husband and all-around cad; he really did inadvertently supply the gold that Napoléon used to hire his ships and escape Elba.
King Louis XVIII fled Paris at midnight on the nineteenth; Napoléon arrived less than twenty hours later, and would have been there sooner but was slowed by the people clogging the roads to greet him. He was carried by the crowd up the stairs of the Tuileries Palace, and Hortense was there to meet him.
The Charlemagne Talisman is real, although on her deathbed Joséphine simply gave it to her daughter, Hortense. At some point in the nineteenth century, the sapphires were replaced with glass. It now rests in the Abbey of Saint-Remi. The jeweled red leather case is my own invention.
The Paris we see today is a very different city from the Paris that Sebastian would have known. Many of its most famous boulevards were plowed through the old city late in the nineteenth century by Baron Haussmann under Napoléon III. Many old buildings have been burned or torn down over the years, but much also remains. The Pont Neuf, with its circular bastions and fanciful mascarons, is still there, joining the Île de la Cité to the Right and Left Banks. Despite its name, it is the oldest bridge in the city. The Renaissance-era triangular square known as the Place Dauphine also still exists, although its eastern range burned during the Paris Commune of 1871. I myself once lived on the Place Dauphine, so of course I had to put Sebastian and Hero there.
Before the Revolution, some wealthy aristocrats actually did amuse themselves by making gardens in open stretches of land around the city, so it is conceivable that something similar was done to the area of wasteland that existed at the time at the tip of the Île de la Cité. But if so, I have never found any evidence of it, so I have taken some liberties in putting one there. The park that exists on the point today, the Square du Vert-Galant, was laid out in the 1880s.
The Tuileries Palace stood just to the west of the Louvre. It was destroyed in the Paris Commune.
The Museum of French Monuments, located in a former convent of Petits-Augustins nuns, existed from 1793 to 1816. It is thanks to the brave people associated with it that so many precious tombs, sculptures, and other objects were not lost forever in the Revolution (the word “vandalism” was coined at that time for a reason). Émile Landrieu is based on the museum’s real-life director, Alexandre Lenoir (who was himself quite a character). After the Restoration, the museum was dissolved and the tombs and other sculptures sent back to their various churches of origin or to the Louvre; the director, Lenoir, went with the royal tombs to Saint-Denis and was put in charge of restoring them. The tombs of the various luminaries Lenoir gathered in the gardens, including the lovers Abélard and Héloïse, were moved to the Père Lachaise cemetery. A smaller, modern version of the museum has been re-created using plaster casts in the Palais de Chaillot, at Place du Trocadéro on the Right Bank opposite the Tour Eiffel; while somewhat off the tourist circuit, it is well worth a visit for anyone interested in medieval art. Much of the Convent of the Petits-Augustins still exists and now houses the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts; it also retains some of Lenoir’s historic fragments.
Napoléon did indeed build a central morgue for Paris. Compared to the crude deadhouses of London, it was a brilliant innovation, and was essentially as Sebastian describes it. In 1864 the morgue moved to a new building behind the cathedral; throughout the nineteenth century, it was a huge tourist attraction as well as being popular with Parisians themselves. When a particularly gruesome or poignant corpse was on display, up to forty thousand people a day were known to visit the morgue and gawk at the naked bodies. By the early twentieth century, changing sensibilities and concerns about the place’s effects on “moral hygiene” forced its closure to the public.
What is now the famous Montmartre cemetery was at the time of the Restoration simply an open, abandoned gypsum quarry. Many of the victims of the guillotine were at one time buried there in a mass grave.
The history of the Paris catacombs is essentially as described here. Parts of them have been open to the public since Napoleonic times.
Notre-Dame-de-Lorette was just one of well over a hundred Parisian churches, monasteries, and convents destroyed during the Revolution; it was later rebuilt.
Many of Paris’s streets and squares have been renamed multiple times over the years, but I have tried to use the names that would have been in place in March 1815. For example, the rue Cerutti was the rue d’Artois both before the Revolution and after the Restoration; it is now rue Lafitte.
As for people: Henri Sanson was the hereditary executioner of Paris. His father did see blood splatters on his tablecloth and hear the screams of the people he’d killed. The family did keep a museum at the rear of their house, and one of the objects there was the original guillotine used during the Terror. Henri’s son, Henri-Clément Sanson, who in time inherited the position, was a drunken gambler and eventually sold the guillotine to Madame Tussaud; it was lost when the waxworks burned. The Sansons and some of their friends actually did experiments to see how long a human head remained conscious and responsive after it was cut off. They concluded thirty to forty seconds.
Hortense Bonaparte was the daughter of Napoléon’s first wife, Joséphine de Beauharnais, and married his brother Louis. Their son eventually became Napoléon III.
Eugène-François Vidocq was a real historical figure. He was the inspiration for both Valjean and police inspector Javert in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, for Jackal in Alexandre Dumas’s The Mohicans of Paris, for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, for Dupin in Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and for countless literary detectives since.
Fanny Carpenter was vaguely inspired by the real-life English novelist Fanny Burney, Madame d’Arblay. Her accounts of her life with her French husband make interesting reading. Her novels, published in the 1790s, did profoundly influence Jane Austen.
Marie-Thérèse did treat the generals who’d served under Napoléon and their wives “like cockroaches.” Her treatment of Ney’s wife is often cited as one of the reasons the marshal went over to Napoléon. Xavier de Teulet is modeled on the Chevalier de Turgy, Marie-Thérèse’s longtime huissier du cabinet and premier valet de chambre, although de Turgy never studied to be a Jesuit.
Joseph Fouché was Minister of Police under Napoléon. A seriously nasty and sinister character, he created a formidable network of spies and informants. As Napoléon neared Paris, Louis XVIII did offer Fouché the Ministry of Police; he refused, then accepted the same position from Napoléon several days later. He is one of the historical figures who inspired my character Lord Jarvis.
Napoléon did have a marshal who was descended from Jacobites who had fled Scotland, but his name was Étienne Jacques Macdonald (and he didn’t have yellow eyes). Unlike Ney, Macdonald did not go over to Napoléon during the Hundred Days. After Waterloo, Marshal Ney was executed by the Bourbons, and several other prominent generals were quietly murdered.
A few other bits and pieces: Malmaison still stands and can be visited, although the gardens were a ruin within a year of Joséphine’s death and what has been re-created today is much reduced. Reproductions of the famous works of the botanical artist Pierre-Joseph Redouté are still selling. Roses and other botanic specimens did pass back and forth across the Channel during the war, and yes, Napoléon’s spies in London did smuggle reports out with the roses. One of the men who worked in the London nursery they used did cross the Channel after the war and go to work for Joséphine, but to my knowledge he was not murdered. The term “rosarian” only came into general usage later in the nineteenth century, but I have employed it here for convenience. The buff-colored, loose-fitting Cossack trousers Antoine de Longchamps-Montendre wears were a style inspired by the uniforms of the Russians who’d so recently occupied Paris. Although they didn’t become the rage in London until some years later, they first appeared in 1814.
And, finally, it was Talleyrand who is credited with saying the Bourbons had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.