Napoleon Bonaparte: A Private Life

1820, Longwood House, Saint Helena

This house is treated by the English as if it were a residence and not what it plainly is, a small and badly managed occupation post set over one man whom they still fear enough to measure. I wake before the light has properly chosen the edges of the room and hear at once the sentry’s pass below the window, the shutter answering the wind, the faint stir in the passage where cups, papers, medicines, and observations are moved in sequence. They count my meals, my walks, my temper, the colour of my face, as though an empire could be reduced at last to a physician’s notes and a governor’s regulations. Let them count. It is the habit of inferior powers to mistake inventory for mastery.

Longwood smells of wet boards, lamp smoke, mould in the leather, vinegar, and the medicinal rubbish Antommarchi arranges as if his little campaigns against the stomach and liver constituted government. The body objects more than it once did. I grant that much because denial wastes time and I have less of it. But pain is not the principal matter. The principal matter is that Europe, unable to beat me into harmlessness while I moved, now means to pin me down in language. Lawgiver, adventurer, tyrant, warning, usurper, system, plague. They prepare the labels while pretending only to supervise my health.

The account requires correction before it closes without me. There are papers already in circulation that have placed the Belgian campaign in the wrong sequence, the Spanish record in the wrong light, and the Russian decision in the hands of men who do not understand the category of problem it was designed to solve. These errors are not trivial. They are structural. They alter the causal line and therefore the instruction. I intend to correct the sequence. The body will cooperate as long as it must.