Publisher's Weekly Review
Australian author Keneally (The Daughters of Mars) once again uses fiction to illuminate a little-known aspect of history. In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte is exiled to the English-governed island of St. Helena. His residence not yet ready, he and his retinue are taken in by William Balcombe, a representative of the East India Company, who has two daughters, Betsy and Jane. The Balcombes, as well as everyone else on the island, find Napoleon to be a charming houseguest, instead of the Great Ogre. But 13-year-old Betsy, smart and independent-minded, is not so easily won over, and her relationship with the former emperor is initially fractious. Eventually, though, their friendship becomes the talk of the island. Then, a new governor to St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe, cracks down on Napoleon's life in exile, cutting his household budget and staff and confiscating Christmas gifts, and even the Balcombes are made to suffer. Ultimately, a shocking scene forces Betsy to reevaluate everything she thinks she knows about her parents, her neighbors, and her new friend. Narrated by Betsy, Keneally's book gives readers a persuasive account of this precocious teenager's view of the world's most infamous man. He makes Betsy an engaging and witty presence, and he charts her destiny into her post-St. Helena existence, where the short general's long shadow continues to affect her life. Like the late E.L. Doctorow, Keneally adapts his style to suit his subject matter, and here the high formality of 19th-century journal-keeping helps bring alive the bittersweet last days of Napoleon. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Despite the title, Keneally's (Shame and the Captives, 2015) latest historical novel is an agonizing coming-of-age story, rather than a predictable chronicle of Napoleon's final years. Permanently exiled to the southern Atlantic island of Saint Helena (the cursed rock) after his disastrous defeat at Waterloo, Napoleon befriends a young girl and her family. Awaiting the completion of his permanent quarters, the former emperor is billeted with the Balcombe family. Fascinated by their temporary houseguest, each family member is inexorably drawn into his exotic and dysfunctional orbit to varying degrees, none more so than young Betsy. Though lopsided in many ways, the quirky friendship that blossoms between the two is understandable, given the spiritual and geographic isolation of both Bonaparte and Betsy. Unfortunately, Napoleon exacts as heavy a price in his personal relationships as he did in his military campaigns, and the Balcombe family is permanently splintered in his emotional war of attrition. Loosely based on actual events and real-life historical figures, Keneally's retelling of Napoleon's Saint Helena years through the eyes of a young girl on the cusp of womanhood makes for a deeply intriguing, if somewhat fanciful, read.--Flanagan, Margaret Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
AN ENGLISHMAN, William Balcombe, moves with his family to a small, distant island in the Atlantic Ocean. There he presides over the East India Company's stores and sales, his job being to provision ships on their way to Cape Town. One day, a newcomer lands on the island and, while his own house is made ready, moves into the Balcombes' summer house next door. The time is 1815, the island is St. Helena, and the newcomer is Napoleon Bonaparte, sentenced to his last exile on his last island. Immediately, the Englishman's daughter, Betsy, and the man they call the Great Ogre take to each other. As the narrator of Thomas Keneally's latest novel, "Napoleon's Last Island," Betsy calls her family's guest other things too, and the permutation of Napoleonic names charts the changing attitude of the Balcombes toward him. There's Boney, of course, the name English nannies had been using for years to frighten their charges into obedience, but also the Universal Demon, the Savage in Chief, the Grand Effulgence, my Grand Playmate, as well as O.G.F., for Our Great Friend, and simply Our Friend. Indeed, Napoleon's names are a political football. The British cabinet has instructed islanders to address him as General, but Barry O'Meara, Napoleon's physician and a friend of the Balcombes, insists upon Emperor. Napoleon and the 13-year-old Betsy don't merely take to each other; they play blind man's bluff, hide-and-seek and engage in sword fights with real swords. "If the reader believes that I am making some special claim over the antic regions of the Emperor's soul," Betsy reports, "then be assured that is precisely what I am doing. I was utterly convinced I was the playmate from the childhood he had never had and which he now possessed the time to pursue." Betsy is not merely the Great Man's friend. She speaks to him boldly, teases and scolds him, and becomes "a votary who showed my devotion by repeated mischief." The teasing becomes mockery, the mockery rancor, and Betsy and Boney wind up quarreling and making up like an old married couple. In the so-called real world, Betsy and her family were flesh-and-blood historical figures whose existence Keneally learned of while visiting a museum in Melbourne. His fascination with Betsy is clear in his decision to use her to tell his story, and in the insightful and nimble prose he attributes to her. His writing is consistently fresh and engaging. Take this description of the wife of the island's bête noire, Sir Hudson Lowe : "Lady Lowe smiled remotely at me. There seemed to be a person submerged in her who was sending messages to the surface of her skin, signaling when to be approving or congenial. Since my father ... was a drinker who concentrated that vice into the span of a few hours a day, I did not recognize the signs in Lady Lowe. Hers was exactly the remoteness of the chronic tippler always absent through calming dosages of - as would come to be said - all-day sherry." As this passage makes clear, the child's story is told by an older Betsy looking back with the knowledge possessed by an adult, although she's also at the mercy of her former immediacy of perception. What Betsy doesn't see plays as great a role in the novel as what she sees. Her knowledge throws light on the events she describes even as her ignorance casts shadows. As in Henry James's novels about children, the combination of knowledge and ignorance creates a chiaroscuro effect that gives the narrative depth. Betsy is prescient, and her adult knowledge often conveniently leaks back into the narrative, filling some of its cracks. But the things she doesn't know still manage to shock her - and the reader - particularly in the novel's climactic episode, a primal scene to trump all primal scenes. Along the way, we learn through Betsy's eyes about the French Revolution, the Terror, the fate of various French nobles and émigrés, Napoleon's rise to power, his victories, the Russian campaign, the retreat from Moscow and his eventual fall. And as the story unfolds with Betsy and her idol in the foreground, we gradually glimpse behind them a rat's nest of alliances, betrayals, love affairs, suspicions, intrigues and spying among both Napoleon's entourage and St. Helena's British authorities. An island is like a ship - the limited space compresses social relations so as to magnify their friction, and Keneally skillfully manages the tension while approaching his catastrophe. "NAPOLEON'S LAST ISLAND" is old-fashioned in the best sense, with all the new-fashioned pleasures that come with toppling heroes from their pedestals, whether they be the scourge of Europe or members of one's own family. The set pieces in the novel, with both affectionate homage and tongue-in-cheek irony, call to mind the giants of 19th-century fiction: a child imprisoned inside the cold and damp stones of a boarding school that feels more like an orphanage (Dickens); a "determined and cunning delinquent" punished by being locked in cupboards and cellars (the Brontës); a young lady's first ball, with a sumptuous gown bought for her by an admirer (Austen); smart soldiers, lovely belles and old generals dancing in country estates amid the lingering echoes of war (Tolstoy). Two signal events become milestones. The first is Napoleon's move to his completed house at Longwood, whose distance strains the intimacy between him and the Balcombes. To be sure, the necessity to accommodate this inconvenient historical fact luffs the novel's sails a bit. The second, Sir Hudson Lowe's arrival as the island's new governor, provides the devil-in-a-box Keneally needs to sustain our interest in the final pages, although some episodes in this portion of the story do feel forced. Lowe himself is a delicious villain, and his tyrannical regimen forces the Balcombes to leave St. Helena. The final chapters describe Betsy's afterlife, which includes a disastrous marriage. Her account of her husband's reaction to her pregnancy gives some of the flavor of Keneally's acute prose and his narrator's mordant wit: "Even as he mimed delight, I could tell that he saw in the imminence of this baby the beginning of a number of them, little apostles of domestic sordidness who would drag him down and weigh on his chances and his ability to wager. I saw his eyes scudding around the walls, calculating how much infantile squalor they could contain without bursting their limits and poisoning the wellsprings of all his hope." Readers will finish this book wanting to know how much of what Keneally describes actually occurred. In all likelihood, the author enjoyed provoking such wishes. Did Napoleon really have his own seesaw in his drawing room, and did he and Betsy ride on it for 45 minutes while he, in a turban and white dressing gown over white pants and shoes, read Corneille to her? More to the point, did Betsy's mother really do the despicable things she is reported to have done in this novel? The answers hardly matter. A novel is a novel, and even as alternate history, "Napoleon's Last Island" seamlessly unites fiction and the "truth," which means in this case that its armature of fact supports its layers of fictional invention as though they were weightless. The delight Keneally took in pulling off this trick shows on every page. Keneally uses the daughter of a real British family to tell the story of Napoleon's life in exile. JOHN VERNON'S most recent novel is "Lucky Billy."
Kirkus Review
Napoleons last exile on the island of St. Helena as related by a British teenager who befriended him.First, we witness the painful death of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose suffering is raised to the level of punishment by the grisly ministrations of drunken and or/quack physicians. The suspense does not lie in what happens to Napoleon but in how he gets to this pass. That is a story told with as much meandering as St. Helenas mountain roads by Betsy Balcombe, teenage younger daughter of William Balcombe, who's employed by the East India Company as a provisioner of goods on the island. When he's first brought to St. Helena, Napoleon, known variously according to ones patriotic bent as the Ogre, OGF (Our Great Friend), the Emperor, or the General, is kept under very commodious house arrest in a guesthouse of the Balcombe residence, the Briars. There, an affinity grows between him and Betsy, nurtured by reciprocal childish pranks and a mutual interest in horsemanship. With a small French entourage and a brimming larder supplied by the East India Company, Napoleon maintains a semblance of court life. The plot drags, though, as the book details Betsys growing pains. Gradually she becomes aware of male suitors and also of her superior attractiveness vis--vis her long-suffering older sister, Jane. Her incipient womanhood threatens her cherished identity as a hellion, and shes disillusioned when a resentful admirer tells her that Napoleon was overheard extolling her feminine charms. There are far deeper disillusionments and betrayals to come. St. Helenas new British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe (in Name and Nature, as he is dubbed by Betsy) arrives determined to make sure that Napoleons exile more closely resembles jail. The strictures he places on the emperor and his ruinous allegations against William Balcombe for befriending him bring about the novels dispiriting and attenuated denouement. The faux regency prose is convincing without being unduly daunting. Clearly, Keneallys sympathies lie firmly with Napoleon and the Balcombes, as will the readers. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In 1815, Napoleon arrives on the remote island of St. Helena to begin his exile under British control. He moves in temporarily to an empty house on the grounds of another residence occupied by a British family, the Balcombes. Their strong-willed, independent-minded teenage daughter Betsy tells the tale of their relationship to the former emperor. Almost immediately, Betsy and her family come under the spell of this charismatic and sympathetic character, cast as a villain by the British establishment and most of Europe but charming, deferential, and witty in the flesh. Later, Napoleon is relocated to another residence on St. Helena, and a new, more severe British commander assumes control of the island. Betsy and her family's friendship and helpfulness toward the exile come to be viewed as treasonous by the new authorities. VERDICT Evidently based on true accounts, the novel as told by Betsy has accurately reproduced the diction of a 19th-century writer, which occasionally slows the pace of this engaging work by well-known Australian author Keneally (-Confederates; Schindler's List). [See Prepub Alert, 4/25/16.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Napoleon's Last Island Our Balcombe family I had just met my husband-to-be when we had word from the Exmouth newspapers and from the harsh cries of coachmen that Our Great Friend had died on the island. This was of course impossible to believe, but we believed in it sufficiently to wail communally and privately. We saw all too sharply in our minds the rooms of Longwood, and that squat, exiled figure peering out of his windows towards the Barn, or Deadwood, or Diana's Peak, in a manner that foretold a bewildered death. Old family wounds gaped anew, and ghosts of varying colorations were released. Eventually, something like the true circumstances of that death came to us from the mouth of an old friend, the Irish surgeon Barry O'Meara. Even though the great loss had occurred, it was temporarily an invigorating thing for our Balcombe family to see O'Meara, up from London, flaws and all, and to look to him to interpret the event and help us drink the chalice of bereavement. When we sat by a fire on a rainy day in June at the Swan's Nest, my father and the Irishman smoking pipes, and a bowl of punch before them, a couple of cups of which my mother was persuaded to take, we glowed with a familial anticipation that despite the circumstances felt like glee. To us, O'Meara had always been a sprite, so we felt strangely eased by the truth that he shared our onus of mourning. He had arrived in our town the day before and sent us a note inviting us to the Swan's Nest. When my father received it, he went sallow with rage. On the island he used to get rubicund with irritation, but in England he turned less healthy colors. In the letter O'Meara raised the question of his naval agent, Mr. William Holmes, a man my father suspected of dishonor. Given the risks my father had taken in order secretly to ship off money drafts drawn by Our Great Friend, the idea that some had stuck to Holmes's hands on the way to Laffitte's bank in Paris was something odious. None, however, seemed to have stuck to O'Meara's, and O'Meara defended his friend in any case, saying that Holmes was about to go to Paris to introduce himself to Laffitte and allay suspicions the bank harbored about the origin of the money bills. My father was not utterly convinced, yet in the flatness and desolation of our lives, we were still pleased to see the face of a fellow conspirator from the island, a face rendered grayer, and his gray suit, familiar from the island, older. By then it was three weeks since the news of OGF's death had come to us by way of the papers, and we were hungry for salient detail, to serve as palpable shelves on which we would stack our grief. Like soldiers of the Grande Armée, who had reportedly, on hearing the news, limped forth into town squares in France, looking about in shock, unable to accommodate themselves to the obliteration from the earth of that Force, we too were shocked. The newspaper accounts, even the well-meaning, progressive scribes, did not always avoid false premises concerning the Emperor and his exile, and were unable to recount credibly what had happened at Longwood House weeks before, since none of them had ever seen the island. We were consoled by the honest accounts of the Morning Chronicle when it arrived in Exminster from London. The Chronicle had the advantage of sources amongst those not rancorous to the Emperor, his admirers and in some cases old friends. But we were appalled by other at best grudging reports, such as that in The Times, which purported to recount the death of a man we could not recognize from the text. All this had deepened our familial depression, of course. We had been suffering for allegiances and services of various kinds to the living Emperor, and now he was gone, our suffering lacked meaning. Most of the time we crept about each other, being terribly kind, even me, the sort of kindness that confessed vacancy at our hearts, and a sense of the meaninglessness before us. And then there came the letter from O'Meara promising to settle with my father the question of Holmes--and that he could give us the truth of OGF's expiring. With these offers O'Meara raised hope that he might return to us our meaning. He told us he had heard from surgeons still on the island the circumstances of the Emperor's death. O'Meara drank up his cup of punch with relish, and that oval, beaming face with the curly black hair now touched with gray seemed to revive before us, and thus a little of the island and the times of promise were restored. There was no layer of despair over his features. He was writing a book, and he believed that would redeem him. My father served him a second cup with a ladle, and he raised it and said solemnly, "I propose a health to the memory of Our Great Friend, whose constitution was destroyed by the Fiend, Sir Hudson Lowe!" Jane, my sister, and I were restricted to tea, and my brothers to cherry sodas. I suspected all at once, unlike our parents, who had been cosseted by the punch, that O'Meara might alter things for us; that the Fiend and the island might now become the one dream, and that all the questions arising from that time might be swallowed in the ocean of OGF's demise. But it could not happen until the matter and process of death was detailed for us. "I once took out a septic tooth from the Great Ogre," declared O'Meara. "A canine tooth. And now I scrape a crust of bread, and let me tell you it is a thin enough crust, out of the septic teeth of Edgware Road--an Indian, Jewish, and Arabian clientele by and large. I am limited to places beyond the eye of the College of Surgeons, and must proceed carefully and modestly if I am ever to be reinstated. And that is the work of Lowe by Name and Nature." "Ah," my father said, warmed by the punch and by an animosity not native to him. "I know, though, that you write pieces in the Chronicle and The Times, Barry, still hammering that man, and justly so. And declaring other things as well." "The men who read that don't know I am a dental surgeon. The people from whom I draw teeth and the men who publish and read don't know each other. It is incumbent upon me . . ." Here the Irish surgeon realized he was speaking rather loudly, and dropped his voice, but there was still color in his face, as if he were being criticized. "It is incumbent upon me to strike that fiend, Sir Hudson, who has violated all human expectation. None of it makes me a rich fellow, but it sustains me as a poor one." My father raised his hand appeasingly, palm out. "You realize that for my part I am with you in the proposition that there does not exist sufficient ink in this world to supply an appropriate condemnation of Lowe by Name and Nature." "The Fiend and Our Great Friend," murmured O'Meara, making the implicit contrast between the small, mean man with all his petty civil and military titles and the small, spacious man with all his flaws. "Do you know that when I left the island they gave him a Corsican horse doctor? You heard that?" "I had not in any detail," my father admitted. "We are far from reliable intelligence in this little town. I have had a few letters from islanders, some intercepted by the powers of the earth along the way, and some smuggled out without interference by store ship captains of my old acquaintance. But even now these missives are a peril to them. Even here, I believe I am subject to a degree of scrutiny." Barry O'Meara nodded ponderously and, with a vividness typical of him, said, "I understand well the methods of those who clipped our wings but yet still want to be fully acquainted with what we do in the chicken yard!" "You mentioned the Corsican doctor," my mother reminded him. "I did. Now that Corsican, the supposed doctor Antommarchi, is a prosector, a cutter of corpses! Our friend Fanny Bertrand told me that he laughs wildly when the idea of death is mentioned because he has private theories about what death is and he won't share them with others. Likewise pain. They are both some sort of human delusion, it seems. If the man would share the secret, it would bring a large saving in opiates." Both men chuckled acridly while my mother frowned and let a shiver move through her. "In any case, this Corsican administered a blistering to Our Great Friend without first shaving the flesh. And to both arms simultaneously! When the man was limp with disease! That barbarous torture brought on a burning rash and OGF cried, 'Am I not yet free of assassins?' But our Corsican quack--what does he do but get the giggles and call in Surgeon Arnott, of the infantry, a fellow I happen to know. Now Arnott was in Spain with the 53rd Regiment when they were more than decimated by OGF's Polish cavalry, with only some fifty-two men left standing at the end. And thus, you see, that is his measure of an emergency, and though an amiable fellow, he is so sanguine a man that he is likely to stand right at the lip of a soldier's grave and declare the poor fellow's condition temporary. And so it was Arnott who was brought to see OGF and afterwards reported to Governor Lowe at Plantation House that the Emperor was surprisingly well, given all rumors to the contrary. He said that OGF was suffering from hypochondria. He assured Name and Nature that if a seventy-four-gun warship were to arrive from England suddenly to take the Emperor away from the island, it would instantly put him on his legs again." My mother made a sound of incredulity and O'Meara went on. "In fact, even had such a mercy been considered by the grand Tories of the Cabinet, he would have died at sea before he reached this shore. Our friends at Longwood had long since written to the Cabinet via the Fiend to ask that the Emperor should be removed to another climate, and be permitted to take the waters at some health spa. But Sir Name and Nature refused to allow the letter to be transmitted, all under the old pretext that the suite had used the term 'Emperor' in their appeal." I remembered that the Dr. Arnott O'Meara spoke of had once paid a visit to Longwood while my father was there, and OGF had greeted him with a jocose question: "How many patients have you killed so far, Mr. Arnott?" The surgeon replied, "Most of my patients happen to have been killed by you, General." Already now I saw my sister beside me beginning to tremble. Her father's daughter, she was overborne by the idea of the ruthless pain to whose ambush humanity was subject, and the onset of her own congestive ailments, signs of which had become visible in the past year, sharpened that. She was more at ease with death than she could ever manage to be with pain. She had become more given to tears, though she had never considered them an enemy or a self-betrayal, even in the years we were on the island. I heard the pace of her wheeze increase now, and I saw her habitual pressing of a handkerchief to her lips. I put my arm around her and enclosed her shoulders. They were almost as thin as they had been six years earlier, when OGF first descended on our garden on the island. Her undeserved affliction was settling in, and the Fiend and great men in England were guilty in part for that too, through the imperfectly sealed cottage we occupied by their implied desire. "And so," Barry O'Meara proceeded, "those great minds, Antommarchi the Corsican goat-doser, and Arnott the smiling fool, decided between them that Our Great Friend should be given a lavement. But OGF had never in sickness or health admired the suggestion that he be turned onto his stomach, which was so tender now, and be interfered with at all by surgeons with such indignity, even by those he tolerated, those he did not consider utter charlatans." "Like you," said my father. "He trusted you." "A lavement?" asked my mother softly. It seemed a kindly word. "An enema," Barry rushed to say. "Certainly, something needed to be done. OGF had been sweating appallingly, and all his mattresses were drenched. My genial informants, Fanny and her husband Henri, also tell me that in the last months the Emperor was like a woman with child, and that everything he ate he vomited. So a lavement was chosen. It would never have been had I been there. It is like trying to erase a bruise from a fist by inflicting one with a mallet! It did nothing to ease his tender stomach. And having failed with one crass remedy, they proceeded to give him castor oil to temper stomach pain, as if he were a child who had eaten too much fruit. The treatment, of course, caused OGF to contort himself into a ball at the base of the bed. The pity of it, Balcombe! The pity! Knotted up like a child, at the base of his bed." Jane let her most honest tears loose then--not that she had any other kind. "Do you want some more tea?" I asked her, but she shook her head and was mute. I dared not look at her for fear now that she would start me on the same course as her, yet I did not want to give Surgeon O'Meara a cause to suspend his report for sensibility's sake. Indeed, he asked my mother now, in a way that made me remember that he knew much about her from the island, "Should I perhaps pursue a different subject, Jane?" "No," said my mother (another Jane) in a breaking voice. "We seek to know all, Barry. We must go through our obsequies too. If there are moans here, it is no different from what we would have uttered had we been there to witness it all. We would like to have that death defined, for otherwise our imaginations are tempted to think of infinite pain." "But I fear it becomes more distressing yet," O'Meara warned my mother. "Even so . . . ," said Jane, my sister. "Yes," my mother agreed, "even so." O'Meara drained his punch and my father poured him another ladleful to fortify him against our distress. Then he recommenced. "So the Corsican quack, who at least knew that things were more serious than Arnott did, sent a message to Name and Nature at Plantation House asking Short--the island's civil doctor you'd remember--and a naval surgeon from the Vigo, Mitchell, to be called in. But sometimes, as I know so well, a congeries of surgeons may simply confirm the party in their worst and least advised opinions. And in any case, battalions of surgeons could not argue with a system so depleted by aggravation and hepatitis as OGF's." The committee of doctors, so O'Meara told us, reached a consensus that the Emperor should rise and be shaved. He told them he was too weak and that he preferred to shave himself but lacked the strength. When Antommarchi and Arnott prodded his liver, the Emperor screamed--it was like a stab from a bayonet--and began to vomit. "What did they all do? Why, nobody worried--they thought it a good sign. And when OGF told them, 'The devil has eaten my legs,' they thought it was poetry, not an omen. Arnott reached the dazzling conclusion that the disease lay entirely in the Emperor's mind. And when Arnott saw Henri Bertrand and the valet Marchand helping OGF walk round the room, he told the others he thought the patient was improving. Arnott did not understand that it was raw courage itself that caused his patient to walk, that he was taking his last steps up Golgotha. So, the surgeons told Sir Hudson Fiend that his prisoner's pallor and decline were deceits of a disaffected mind. Whereas OGF well knew what was wrong with him. For here, my dear Balcombes, was a great mind, vaster in gifts and power of imagination than the squalid little shambles of their intellects. Not one of them ever asked what the patient thought! For twenty days he told them that it was fegato, his liver. But what would he know?" "And was it the liver?" asked my father, deeply invested in O'Meara's narration and enduring it under his conflicting identities as a man befriended, a friend betrayed, a devotee--nonetheless--to the end. My mother was for now silenced by a similar order of grief and confusion. "I mean, entirely the liver?" "Oh, no, it was sadly the stomach too." O'Meara grew thoughtful. "Oh, how lucky we were to ride forth with him in those earlier days! I remember watching you two young women accompanying him one day over the edge of the ravine and into that abomination of boulders known as the Devil's Glen. It was a sight--the three of you, the balance of all he knew and, well, your unworldliness then, in that arena of chaos--that affects me now. As you see, I am close to tears. And to think that OGF reached a stage where he could scarcely bear the fatigue of a ride in the carriage for half an hour, with the horses at a walk, and then could not walk from the carriage into his house without support. Remember his confiseur Pierron, who made those fantastical delicacies for him? Towards the end all that was nothing to OGF--he could digest only soups and jellies, served in those Sèvres bowls on which were painted records of his glories. Both the contents of the bowl and the ornamentation inadequate, alas, to nourish him any further! Our Great Friend choked and gagged and starved for lack of a capacity to swallow, and like many desperate patients he said unkind things. And when he vomited it was black matter, alike to coffee grounds." "How could that not have alerted Dr. Arnott and the Corsican?" my mother protested. "They were associated in denial," O'Meara explained. "You must understand that each time they saw Name and Nature, he ranted with all the energy he possessed that the illness was a trick to garner the world's concern. A pretense. That has an influence on men's thoughts, on the thought of surgeons of limited skill. Sir Hudson Fiend wondered about moving him into that newly built house near Longwood, but the Emperor's suite knew his condition was terminal, and so did--in their own way--far better surgeons than the claque of asses assigned to the poor fellow. And so did Sir Hudson Fiend, because though he could not stop pretending that the Emperor was a malingerer, he knew in his waters that some fatal stage had been entered on. So he moved himself and his odious chief of police, Sir Thomas Reade, into the new house and waited there. His systems of persecution were close to bringing him a complete result." Jane still nursed her tears. We were all pale. Even my little brothers listened soundlessly to O'Meara, to whom they had never in all our time knowing him extended that compliment before. "De Montholon told me in a letter--I give away no secret; it has been written in the French papers that at four o'clock on one of those last mornings the Emperor called him and related with astonishing and desperate grief that he'd just seen his Josephine and that she would not embrace him. She had disappeared when he reached for her, he said, but not before telling him that they would see each other again, de nouveau. De Montholon reminded him that de nouveau did not mean bientôt. Then he and others set to change the Emperor's soaked bedclothes and replace the sweat-drenched mattress. This is what it had come to. Better, wrote dear Bertrand to me, that he had been killed by a cannonball, obliterated at dusk on the day of that final battle six years past than die hunched in the bottom half of his bed." We could see that O'Meara was nearing an end to his narration. Jane's unpretentious and authoritative tears increased. My mother's face held a blue pallor, and my father glowed with a revived unhealthy ruddiness made up of bewildered and conflicting thought and brandy. "So, OGF was persuaded to move to a new bed in the drawing room since that was more airy. He would let only de Montholon and Marchand the valet help him--a good man altogether, that Marchand. He permitted them to swathe his legs with hot towels. "Our dear friends had had an altar set up in the next apartment," O'Meara said. "An Italian priest had landed on the island after we went. Apparently he is a clodhopper, yet the Emperor liked him. If he were not irrational in his friendships, OGF, some of us would not be his friends, would we? And the priest was ordered to say Mass every day. Well, the Emperor had never renounced the Church of Rome, even if he had imprisoned the Pope himself." "Mercy, Barry," my mother pleaded. "You must take us now to the point." Yet O'Meara, with a sure instinct, was out to make us share in every detail, as relayed by friends on the island and by the French suite. So we heard how the surgeons decided next to give OGF calomel, mercury chloride, in a desire to make the poor man vomit more black grounds, as if these too were part of a mental attitude that must be corrected. But they had overdosed him with ten grains of the stuff, which he could barely swallow and which, when he did, caused him to vomit up both the black matter and blood. After that, he refused to see the corps of attendant doctors. He began to think O'Meara was still on the island, and kept calling for him. "He began thinking you Balcombes were still on the island too. 'And Guglielmo Balcombe, where is he?' he asked. Honestly, he had such affection for you, William, and hoped he had never wronged you. 'Has he really left? When did it happen? And Madame Balcombe too? How very strange. She really has gone.' " My parents lowered their eyes. They did not take equal joy in the Emperor's confused remembrance. O'Meara recognized it--he had said something that meant more to the Balcombe parents, and indeed their children, than he could tell. "They moved him to the drawing room because there was less damp. On the day before his death, he had sunk into a coma and the shutters were opened to let the light and the island's air in, which could not harm him now, it having done its damage. And off beyond the railings stood the new version of Longwood House, where the Fiend camped, biting his nails. He was so restless for it to happen that he rode across to the real Longwood and stood at the door listening for the advance of death inside, yet knowing he would not be admitted. He would ride off again, but be back within an hour or so. Meanwhile, my dear friends, OGF was on his camp bed, which sat so low to the ground, but which bore four mattresses to elevate him." The green silk curtains, which we remembered from his time in the Pavilion, were now drawn. A few seconds before the time of the evening gun from Ladder Hill, said O'Meara, OGF expired. Fanny Bertrand was in the room, half-Irish, half-imperial Fanny, a woman fit for ceremoniousness, and she remembered, as he breathed out and the breath was not succeeded, to stop the clock in his room, the one he'd always shown off to us, the alarm clock. It read eleven minutes before six. By the time O'Meara reached this stage, we women were choking and my father's head was still down, and the boys, William, Tom, Alex, were pale, old enough now to be awed out of boyishness. I thought how noble a man my father, Billy Balcombe--Cinq Bouteilles, as OGF called him--was. He blamed the Emperor for nothing, for no portion of the blight on our own lives. The tale was briskly finished. O'Meara seemed to know he must get to an end if he did not wish to provoke some unpredictable contrary feeling amidst my parents--for all he knew, a frantic quarrel was possible. Marchand and the other valets had carried the body from the death bed to a new camp bed. The priest laid a crucifix on the breast of the corpse and left the room. Outside he recited the rosary. Name and Nature turned up at the door of Longwood but was denied entry by Bertrand, who told him the autopsy must proceed. This dissection took place in a room we acutely remembered--where the billiard table had once been, and the maps on which I'd stuck pins to represent the movement of hordes of men around the countryside near Jena and Auerstädt. Afterwards, Surgeon Short, one of the group, writing that the Emperor's liver was grossly swollen, came under great pressure from Sir Hudson, Name and Nature, to alter his report. The Fiend thought he might somehow be blamed for that distended organ. Short refused and left the report in Sir Hudson's hands, and according to Short, Name and Nature himself changed the words, crossing out Short's verdict. Fortunately, Short had the final chance to write on the document that the words obliterated had been suppressed by the Fiend's orders. Meanwhile, the autopsy over, the dead man was moved back to his bedroom, which had been set out in the manner of a mortuary chapel and draped in black. The next morning Name and Nature came in with a posse of fifteen officials, including Sir Tom Reade, and declared the corpse was "the General," as he still called him even in death, and asked both his party individually and General Bertrand to confirm it. Reade was not fully happy, for there was no achievable happiness in such a man. He appeared in part to believe that his enemy, OGF, had taken the game to the extreme now. In a bid for world sympathy, he had died. The soldiers, the sailors, and the farmers, the Letts, the Robinsons, old Polly Mason, the Reverend Mr. Jones, keeper of the sheep and goats, the Porteouses, the Solomons, the Ibbetsons, the Knipes, the Dovetons, and all the rest were let in to see the chin-strapped corpse dressed in military style, lying on the old blue cloak from the great victory of his youth, Marengo, and dressed by Marchand and the others in the green coat of a colonel of the chasseurs of the Imperial Guard, with white facings, the sash, the Légion d'honneur, the cavalry boots, and with the bicorn hat across his lower stomach. General Bertrand and Count de Montholon stood by him, in their uniforms, and in a gown of mourning, inimitable Fanny, the best-dressed woman even in bereavement that the island had ever seen, and the most faithful. I imagined the yamstocks--the island-born--processing through those rooms that were known to us, gawping at the maps on the wall, the books, the peepholes in the shutters he used for watching the garrison and to see me win the ladies' race at Deadwood from which all the glory had long since been sucked. They must have known, those islanders, that their world was about to shrink. The garrison would go, the squadron would sail away, and all items would plummet in cost. A death mask had had to be made, and quickly. The first was not successful, so Novarrez, doorkeeper of Longwood, shaved him for a second mask undertaken with pulverized gypsum. But the processes of death were under way, and by that afternoon the body had to be placed promptly in a coffin. Hearing this, we groaned and cast our eyes about. This was more of mortality than we could bear. "Enough, enough," said O'Meara, as if to himself. "You have made us," said my mother, "devour the entire bitter loaf." "As we must," growled my father. One quick, abominable detail: they had removed the heart to send to his wife and now placed it in the room near the corpse, with a cloth over it. During the night, a rat emerged in the room and grabbed the heart half off its silver dish. "That rat, the very image of the Fiend, then went on to devour half the dead man's ear. . . . You see? You see?" And we did see. That representative of darkness, in eating heart and ear, passion and the senses, provided gruesome echoes of the cramping of ambitions of self-redemption on the Emperor's part by a paltry and choleric Englishman. Finally it was easier to listen. So we heard that the soldiers of two regiments had carried him on their shoulders to the hearse, which had made its way into Geranium Valley, ever after to be called the Valley of the Tomb, with friends and servants weeping behind it. Name and Nature rampaged through Longwood, being free to do so at last, and looked at all that the Emperor had set aside before he died, including a gold snuffbox for his London friend Lady Holland. Then he rifled through papers to see if he could discover plans of escape, which could be used to justify the strangulation process he had put in place. "And the fact that he could find nothing suggestive of it goes to explain the attacks which now appear upon him, Name and Nature, in all honest newspapers." O'Meara spoke as if he were not himself one of the chief attackers. "Consummatum est," he sang conclusively. "It is consummated." He helped himself to more punch. Excerpted from Napoleon's Last Island by Thomas Keneally All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.