In the misty uplands beyond Longwood it usually rained.

Our first stop was The Briars, William Balcombe’s old property, reached by the Sidepath, one of two steep roads out of town hacked from the rocky slopes by slaves. The Briars, a shelf of soft land perched above the fork of the Jamestown ravine, was now the name for a suburb of new houses; Balcombe’s old Indian-style villa was gone, destroyed by termites.

The earliest mention of a house ‘of some size’ called the ‘Bryers’ on 59 acres of land was in 1768. Balcombe bought the property in 1807, changed the spelling and constructed the pavilion. After he left the island, the property fell into the hands of the East India Company; they planted mulberry bushes and attempted to establish a silkworm farm. Like other attempts to create a viable economic mainstay for St Helena—including lacemaking, coffee and flax—the silk industry failed.

In 1901, The Briars became the headquarters for the cable and wireless station. In 1914, in photographs taken by Graham Balfour, a cousin of Robert Louis Stevenson, it appeared to have been extended into a handsome two-storey villa with at least six upstairs rooms. In 1957, an Australian, William Balcombe’s great-granddaughter, Dame Mabel Brookes from Melbourne, visited St Helena. By then the termites had done their worst: The Briars’ main house had become a crumbling ruin, only the back quarters and cellar remaining.1 Two years later it was demolished to build an ugly concrete-block house for the cable and wireless station manager.2

However, the Pavilion survived—now capitalised in honour of its important former occupant. Because of her family’s connection with Napoleon, Brookes purchased The Briars Pavilion, and two years later, in a ceremony at Malmaison, outside Paris, she deeded it to the French nation. Since then it has been one of the three French domains of St Helena.

The prisoner’s habits during the two months he stayed at The Briars proved to be simple and orderly in the extreme. His campaign bed was set up in the pavilion’s one room, and Las Cases and his son would retire each night up the ladder to the two tiny garret spaces, where it was impossible to stand upright. Marchand slept on a mattress guarding the pavilion’s doorway and wrote that his master’s comfort was his chief concern: ‘The table was placed in the middle of the room with a rug over it; it was used as a desk and a dining table, as the room itself was a bedroom, work room and dining room. It was impossible to be more restricted than the Emperor was, but he was free to move about so the rest could be overlooked. A dresser was offered to me with such insistence by Mr Balcombe that I accepted it. I spread out on it the Emperor’s travel case, which, once opened, adorned the room. I sent to town for the silver washbasin from the Elysée-Bourbon palace.’3

The usual hour for rising was eight o’clock, and Napoleon seldom took anything but a cup of coffee before resuming the dictation of his memoirs. The garden of the pavilion with its view of the waterfall was a delightful place to work. He and Las Cases sat at an iron table in the coolness of a grape arbour while Napoleon relived his military campaigns, the details of his battles and his civil reforms. He aimed for a sequential order, beginning with the Siege of Toulouse, the Italian campaigns, the occupation of Egypt and then the history of the Consulate; however, he kept returning to the subject of Waterloo, which was a constant irritant, a scab he had to pick. He could not conceive how it had ended in defeat; his tactics should have worked! The little count covered reams of paper with his spidery calligraphy, confident that every page was money in his pocket. Back in the pavilion his son worked industriously, making fair copies of the work completed.

They broke for lunch at one and for dinner at nine. For the first week, meals were delivered by slaves from the boarding house in Jamestown, where, according to Dr O’Meara, there was now ‘a suitable table in the French style provided by Mr Balcombe’.4 However, the food always arrived cold. ‘It was obvious that the Emperor would live very poorly as a result of this arrangement,’ wrote Marchand. ‘Count de Las Cases and his son had to do without table napkins the first day, as the table linen had not yet arrived.’5 Not appreciating the difficulties in importing livestock and vegetables, the French grumbled constantly about the fare, none more stridently than Las Cases on behalf of his master: ‘The bread and wine are not such as we have been accustomed to, and are so bad that we loathe to touch them. Water, coffee, butter, oil, and other articles, are either not to be procured, or are scarcely fit for use.’6

But Napoleon and Las Cases did not complain directly to Balcombe, thus preserving good relations. One evening Napoleon made a suggestion to Marchand: ‘he said he had a butler and a pantry chef in town; one of the two could be with him and, without disturbing Mrs Balcombe, could take advantage of the room where the slaves cooked their food. In this way he could have a hot dinner.’7 The Balcombes agreed to the arrangement, and two days later, Le Page, the chef, and Pierron, the pantry head, arrived. They were given the use of the slaves’ kitchen and were accommodated in the servants’ quarters. Cipriani the butler remained in town and cooperated with Balcombe to cater for the French people in rented accommodation, while sending up daily provisions for the pavilion.

At first Le Page failed to understand the limitations island living imposed, and startled the governor’s council secretary, Thomas Brooke, with his extravagance: ‘In a place where fresh beef was so precious as to have occasioned restrictions upon its consumption, it may well be conceived that sensations of no ordinary nature were excited at a demand from the maître-d’hotel of the Ex-Emperor, a few days after his arrival, for four bullocks, in order to make a dish of brains! . .