He opined that English people were gluttons and drank far too much. Betsy responded that his countrymen lived on frogs. With no thought for decorum she jumped up from the table, ran down to the main house and returned a few moments later, waving a caricature from a magazine. It was labelled ‘A Frenchman’s dinner’ and showed a long, lean Frenchman, his mouth open and a frog on his tongue, ready to jump down his throat. Napoleon laughed and pinched her ear.

The disapproval of Las Cases and his son was palpable. But Napoleon saw an opportunity to repay Betsy in kind. He had joked before that she would make a suitable wife for Emmanuel, the fourteen-year-old ‘le petit Las Cases’, and enjoyed her indignation: ‘Nothing enraged me so much; I could not bear to be considered such a child, and particularly at that moment, for there was a ball in prospect, to which I had great hopes Papa would allow me to go, and I knew that his objection would be founded on my being too young.’30 Napoleon insisted that young Emmanuel should kiss the girl and clasped her hands while the boy did as he was told. Betsy squirmed and, the moment her hands were free, boxed the ears of le petit Las Cases.

As was his habit, Napoleon ate his meal quickly and abruptly terminated it, pushing his chair away from the table. Protocol obliged them all to put down their cutlery and rise to their feet. It had been arranged that after dinner they would join the senior Balcombes at the house for a game of whist. The party descended to the main house for the card game, walking in single file down the steep, narrow steps at the side. Napoleon led the way, followed by Las Cases, then his son, with Betsy bringing up the rear behind her sister. She lingered about ten yards behind, then ran with all her force onto Jane, who fell with extended hands onto le petit Las Cases, who in turn was thrown upon his father. The count, to his dismay and embarrassment, was pushed against Napoleon, who stumbled and just managed to stay upright.

Betsy hooted with laughter at the confusion. But Las Cases was thunderstruck at the insult to his sovereign and his own loss of dignity. He seized the girl by the shoulders and pushed her violently onto the rocky bank. She burst into tears and cried: ‘Oh! Sir, he is hurting me!’

‘Never mind,’ Napoleon replied, ‘ne pleurs pas [don’t cry]—I will hold him while you punish him.’ He held onto his distinguished chamberlain while Betsy boxed the man’s ears until he begged for mercy. Napoleon released Las Cases, but only for more taunting, ordering him to run; if he could not run faster than the girl, he deserved to be beaten again. The little count skipped, breathless, around the lawn, frantic and humiliated, with Betsy after him, Napoleon laughing and clapping his hands. Of this episode Betsy concluded, unsurprisingly: ‘Las Cases never liked me after this adventure, and used to call me a rude hoyden.’31

Perhaps Napoleon enjoyed these antics. But doubtless there was calculation on his part even amid the fun and silly games. He knew that accounts of them, received in London and even reported in The Times, made him seem sympathetic, humanised him: ‘Mr Balcombe has two smart young daughters, who talk the French language fluently, and to whom he is very much attached; he styles them his little pages. There is a number of little stories of the innocent freedoms they take, and how highly he is diverted by it.’32

CHAPTER 7

THE FRENCH SUITE

I hung back behind the tour group and decided to take in the rest of the excursion on another day. At the side of the Pavilion I came down a flight of narrow stone steps leading to the garden—the same steep steps where Betsy had created havoc. The garden felt drowsy and peaceful, still dominated by two great yew trees and a date palm from the Balcombes’ time, but there were no fish in the small dank pond where the dog Tom Pipes had splashed about. Where the villa with its long, colonnaded verandah had stood there was a graceless concrete-block building and beyond it some rusting scaffolding and old cable drums in the grass, the remains of the cable and wireless headquarters.

The canaries and Java sparrows Betsy described—brought by East India Company ships—had gone, but Indian mynahs flittered about in squabbling, fussy numbers. A former resident of The Briars was responsible for the preponderance of these drab little creatures all over the island: in 1868, Miss Phoebe Moss brought a cage of six mynahs from England and released them in The Briars’ garden, imagining they might feast on the invasive white ants. The crumbling ruin that the house became testified to the fact that they did not.

Wandering across the grass, I picked up something that projected, shining, from a low rock wall—a curved shard of blue and white porcelain, a tiny piece of a cup, fragmented images of a teahouse and a fisherman in a boat, the willow pattern. It was probably part of a tea set brought from China on an East Indiaman. Perhaps Napoleon once drank from the cup.