Marshal & Master

NAPOLEON AT ST. HELENA (318 pp.)--The Journals of General Bertrand, January-May, 1821--Doubleday ($3.75).

"The finest piece of work since the Romans," said Napoleon of General Henri-Gatien Bertrand's bridging of the Danube in 1809. Four years later, Napoleon made Bertrand grand marshal of the imperial palace, and in this capacity the old soldier followed his master into exile at St. Helena. When Bertrand died, in 1844, he bequeathed his notebooks of the exile to his daughter Hortense, who in turn entrusted them to a French bureaucrat with orders to publish them 25 years after her death. All in all, it was not until 1946 that the grand marshal's strongbox was finally opened, and his St. Helena papers were laid before the historians.

"But after the first thrill of emotion, what a formidable surprise!" says Transcriber Paul Fleuriot de Langle. The papers comprise a diary which records Napoleon's conversations throughout the exile, and a regular summary of daily court life. But everything was written in a private shorthand of hieroglyphic complexity, e.g., "N.a. j. et. d. sa. sal. de bil une Ba; il. dde au Gm. sil sa. ce. q. c'e. C'une ma. de G. il d. dab. q. cest un bal. p. ses enf. Est ce p. ser. a desc. sur un remp; pen d'esp. p. un ing. sa f. . . ."

Armed with a magnifying glass and cheered on by old Napoleon buffs, De Langle began to unscramble the gibberish. He found that General Bertrand had made the job still more difficult by referring to himself not as "I," but as "Bertrand," or "the Grand Marechal," or worst of all, since it invited confusion with Napoleon himself, as "he." It was three long years before De Langle could figure out who was talking to whom about what (at times even proper names were abbreviated to initials), and could interpret the above example as:

"Napoleon has had a seesaw installed in the billiard room, and he asked the Grand Marechal if he had any idea what it was.

" 'Some kind of war machine, I suppose,' Bertrand said. 'Is it possible to use it for getting down on to a rampart?'

" 'Well,' [said the Emperor], 'that's not very bright for an engineer--God's teeth!'" Reason for Napoleon's impatience: he only hoped to get some exercise seesawing with his grand marshal.

First Rule of Happiness. Napoleon at St. Helena contains Bertrand's diary for a mere five months (the last) of the five years and seven months of the exile. And yet, if no more than this small extract from the total work existed, it would still add up to one of the most fascinating books ever written about Napoleon. The deposed conqueror was in the last stages of cancer. Where he had formerly briskly ' dictated his memoirs (TIME, Oct. 23, 1950) and laid hopeful plans for the future, he now sank to the role of an ordinary human being nearing his end. He spent his hours reminiscing garrulously--sometimes about his Corsican childhood, his family and his rise to fame; sometimes coarsely about the Empress Josephine's posterior ("On it could be found the three islets of Martinique") ; sometimes firing dozens of questions, e.g., "Is the water from the Thames good? "Where does licorice come from?" "How does the liver communicate with the stomach?" "The brick gates [of Troy] had to be knocked down, according to Virgil. With what? How long did it take? . . . Was Aeneas married or not?"

Bertrand not only recorded all such questions and their answers, he also interrogated everyone who talked with Napoleon in his absence. In this way he discovered, for instance, that the Emperor was secretly furious with him for not having given him Madame Bertrand as a bedmate. The faithful marshal never flinched. He kept his wife to himself, but his pen was at his master's service night & day.

Napoleon's observations from the 'last months :

P: "The first and most important thing for happiness is never to incur any debts. The second is to spend no more than two-thirds of one's income . . . Women's clothes are a quite ruinous expense, and a very bad investment. It is enough for a woman to be clean and decently garbed."

P: "[Voltaire] loved money? Well, of course he did. That's obvious. Money means everything."

P: "Nothing is more cowardly than an aristocracy that is afraid, nothing more terrible than when it has nothing to fear." P: "If I had the choice I would go to America . . . I would pay a visit to Louisiana; after all, it was I who gave it to the Americans."

P: "A distinction should be drawn between Revolutionary interests and Revolutionary theories . . . I . . . preserved the ... interests while banishing the . . . theories." P: "I am very glad that I have no religion. I find it a great consolation, as I have no imaginary terrors and no fears of the future."

P: "It is always advisable to negotiate. It gives one a means of learning what is going on, and it slows down any [enemy] preparations for war."

The Question of Barley. Napoleon was incapable of dropping a subject, no matter how small, until (as he said) he had "grasped it by the head, the seat, the hands and feet, and by the head."

"It appears," he would say, "that furze is the best type of pasture to grow on artificial meadows. Everyone says that it is better to put sheep out to graze than to keep them in sheepfolds." Focused on such a matter, he would consider nothing else "for ten or twelve hours," studying it in encyclopedias, questioning visitors about it. turning it over & over in his mind. Most of his chosen topics are not likely to interest the general reader very much, but they provide one superb demonstration after another of the Napoleonic method at work.

But as the last weeks of his life go by, the passionate questions become more & more trivial ("Is barley syrup made from barley?"), the obsessive topics more & more Promethean and miserable ("The cowards, to keep an unarmed man imprisoned upon a rock!"). The books and encyclopedias on his tables are replaced by syringes and bowls, bottles of orange-flower water, gentian, licorice, quinine and calomel. The doctors hover around the bed, urging this & that on the dying dictator, until he shouts: "Shut up, you bore me!'' The conversation is of little else but the sickroom, the Emperor turning and twisting in pain on his iron bed. or hobbling feebly about the room in a flannel nightshirt. He shouts: "Don't maul me!" and "Oh, my God, my God, my God!"

Who Retreats? A few days before his death, he suddenly tells the doctors: "It's a lost cause." He enters a half-waking trance, broken only by his groaning, hiccuping and incomprehensible muttering. In the small hours of May 5, 1821, he cries: "Who retreats?", and then.: "At the head of the Army!" In the late afternoon, Napoleon sighs three times, his pupils flicker, his chin twitches up & down with "clockwork regularity"--and an equerry hurries off to inform the British governor that it is all over.

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