In his latest novel, Keneally tells the extraordinary story of the emperor’s last years on the remote island of St Helena. Here he reveals how artefacts from the emperor’s home, now on display, inspired him to write the book
On a winter’s day in Melbourne in 2012 I was offered some tickets to an exhibition of Napoleon’s uniforms, furniture, china, paintings, snuff boxes, military decorations and memorabilia. We are often told he is a tyrant but we do not quite listen. We hear him compared to Hitler, but the comparison does not take root. For all the blood and human waste and murderous narcissism of his career, the late phases of the French Revolution and the Consulate, and then the Empire, possess ineffable style in ideas and new politics, in art and human venturing.
There were reasons in the exquisite furniture the emperor and Josephine had commissioned from Jacob Frères, who might have come as close to heaven in their creations as any furniture makers of history, interspersed with Sèvres porcelain and silver plates, and paintings by Ingres and David. Everything, I assumed, came from Europe. In fact, it was not so. Some of the material, including a Légion d’honneur, a swatch of the emperor’s hair, and a death mask of the man showing some mutilation of his head, came in fact from an 1840s homestead named The Briars, only 20 miles away from the city. And there, in the catalogue, was a name that teased the brain: Betsy Balcombe. The Australian items seemed to have a connection with this adolescent girl who had lived on the mid-Atlantic island of St Helena when the emperor was stuck there. And the Balcombes, ultimately exiled to Australia, had brought these memorabilia with them. The idea of a friendship between the emperor and a girl who would end up in Australia, her family destroyed by their association with him, gripped me utterly.
Continue reading...
0 comments:
Post a Comment