He tried to kill himself but survived the vial of poison (it was only a half-attempt, really, the valet said in private). When he woke the next morning (exhausted, thirsty, pale), the world was still as he had left it. The Russians had occupied Paris and he’d been exiled to the island of Elba in the Mediterranean. It appeared the gods wished him to endure a little longer.

But the climate down there, the Italians, the clear blue sea, it was something like Corsica. When he stepped off the ship in Portoferraio, a huge crowd of people had gathered to greet him.

‘Viva l’imperatore!’

Bonaparte quickly revived. His boots were polished for hours, his stride lengthened. With a personal army of some twelve hundred soldiers, two or three small ships (he referred to them as his navy) and an entourage of workers, footmen, valets, chefs and secretaries bequeathed to him by the victors, he set about improving what he saw as the miserable lot of Elba’s inhabitants.

He planted trees, cleaned the streets and organised garbage collectors. He improved the water supply and established gardens, irrigated new crops. They said there hadn’t been a man possessed of such boundless energy since—well, they couldn’t remember when. There had never been such a man before!

Only the news of Josephine’s death could halt his constant, relentless advance. When Bonaparte was told of it, he stayed in his rooms for three days and refused to see anybody.

Further days passed, weeks, months; the Emperor endured. He wrote to his wife, the Empress Marie-Louise (every morning, every day), but the Empress stalled and made excuses, until finally she resented his demands for her presence on Elba. (‘It is only his reputation he cares about,’ she was told, repeatedly, by her entourage of minders. ‘You must forget him.’) Soon enough, she did forget him and succumbed to the many charms of her handsome chaperone, General Graf von Neipperg. Then she never opened another letter from Bonaparte again.

He tried to keep busy, but his false enthusiasms were exposed and shivered into dust, every day by day. For truly, there was nothing to match his ambition there on Elba. Where was he? Nowhere! The scale, it was all wrong, reduced. The world was out of proportion.

An island wasn’t nearly enough.

He endured. Then finally, after three hundred days on the island of Elba, Napoleon Bonaparte escaped.

LUCKY BREAK

They gave him a conditional pardon (half free, that is, until further notice) and changed his name at the same time. John Myer in the paperwork now, everything official, Lieutenant Governor Lachlan Macquarie signed it and there was nothing else for Johannes to think about.

Until they caught him two months later receiving stolen ewes. Judge George Tobias Fitzgerald presiding, in his yellowing wig and with his various ailments, sentenced John Myer again, another fourteen years’ hard labour down in Van Diemen’s Land.