Or Madame Bertrand on one of her visits. I slipped it into my handbag.

On 21 October, a carriage arrived, bringing General Gourgaud, the Bertrands and the Montholons from the boarding house in town to see the emperor’s accommodation at The Briars.

Lieutenant-General Henri Gatien, Comte de Bertrand, was, at the age of 42, a military man of vast experience, admired for his bravery and moral integrity. As the former grand marshal at the Tuileries palace, he was the most important person to have gone into exile with Napoleon, who said of him: ‘Bertrand is henceforth identified with my fate, he has become historical.’1 It was a sacrifice he volunteered for himself but imposed on his wife Fanny and their three small children.2 However, he had no choice but to leave France: he had been proscribed from re-entering the country and knew that a death sentence would follow.3 Marchand observed that Bertrand ‘cared little about the judgement against him, but it was not the same for the Countess, who not only feared for her husband, but for the future of her children as well’.4

Betsy considered the Countess Bertrand the most distinguished woman she had ever seen, tall and upright in her bearing, her dress of the best Parisian quality but without ostentation. ‘I always thought every one else sank into insignificance when she appeared; and yet her features were not regular, and she had no strict pretensions to beauty, but the expressions on her face were very intellectual, and her bearing queen-like and dignified.’5 Mrs Balcombe found her gracious and was glad to converse in English, which Fanny spoke fluently, having been partly educated in England. The British side of her family claimed descent from the Plantagenets and Charles II.

Françoise-Elisabeth (Fanny) Dillon was born on 24 July 1785 at a French chateau close to the Belgian border, although the first few years of her life were spent in the West Indies.6 Her grandfather Henry was an Irish peer who served in the military service of France’s ancien régime, as did her late father, the Honourable General Arthur Dillon, who was made a count of the French nobility.7 Most British Roman Catholics were prohibited from serving as officers in the British army or Royal Navy by the Test Act of 1673. Fanny’s father continued a century-long family tradition by committing to France as the commander of the Régiment de Dillon, part of the famous Irish Brigades founded in 1690 that fought with France in many wars in Europe, India and America. He served with distinction against the English during the American War of Independence and in the West Indies. Fanny’s mother, Laure, was from a Martinique planter family and was a cousin of Josephine de Beauharnais, the future empress.8

A revolutionary tribunal condemned Arthur Dillon to death on 13 April 1794, and the following day he was sent to the guillotine together with seventeen other condemned persons, some of them distinguished by birth and others by crime. They were conveyed in common carts to the Place de la Révolution, where a crowd awaited them.9 Fanny was nine years old at the time of her father’s execution and was deeply traumatised by the horror; she grieved for him and remained a committed monarchist.

In 1795, Fanny’s mother escaped with her to England. But with the advent of the Consulate, they felt confident they could return to France. Josephine, wife of First Consul Bonaparte, took an interest in Fanny, her attractive young relative who shared a Martinique background, and set about finding a good match for her.10 Napoleon’s loyal aide-de-camp, General Henri Gatien Bertrand, was smitten with the young woman. He has been described as ‘a little man, bald and thin, not much of a personality, a good engineer, an indifferent general but not lacking in courage; of unquestionable honesty, of quick understanding, of unconquerable obstinacy and of the best moral character’.11 Fanny was unimpressed and rebuffed his approaches. Bertrand, about to be made a divisional general and a Count of the Empire, was, according to another French historian, ‘an eminently marriageable man, by his position, his military bravery and competence, and by his moral qualities. But he had been living as a celibate. For two years he sighed in vain after the beautiful Fanny Dillon.’12 Napoleon, returning from Bayonne, ordered Fanny to settle for his aide-de-camp. She protested: ‘What, Sire, Bertrand . . . Bertrand! Imitator of the Pope by his mode of life!’ ‘That is enough, Fanny,’ Napoleon told her bluntly as he left the room.13

In the end she had no option. Napoleon had often complained, ‘Too many of my generals married when they were corporals,’ resenting some of the vulgar officers’ wives at his receptions. He was determined that Bertrand should have the refined woman he desired. The couple were married in 1808—Fanny was 23 and her husband twelve years older—with Napoleon sending directives from the Erfurt battlefield, for ‘the great man had found time to rule on the most minute details of the wedding of his favourite aide-de-camp’.14 The emperor was lavish with wedding presents: a grand home and surrounding park, and for the bride ‘a dowry of 200,000 francs in shares in the Loing canal, diamonds to the value of 50,000 francs and trousseau costing 30,000 francs’.15 Bertrand and Fanny became accustomed to grandeur.

It is small wonder that the Balcombes found the Countess Bertrand impressive. With memories of the luxuries of palace life behind her, Fanny and her husband now crowded into Napoleon’s tiny pavilion with the other visitors. Fanny had brought a gift with her: a miniature of the Empress Josephine, her second cousin. As Napoleon held the cameo portrait of his dead ex-wife, Betsy watched on, touched by the expression on his face: ‘He gazed at it with the greatest emotion for a considerable time without speaking. At last, he exclaimed it was the most perfect likeness he had ever seen of her, and told Madame Bertrand he would keep it, which he did, until his death.’16

General Charles Tristan de Montholon was a decade younger than Bertrand, handsome but effete, elegant and particular concerning his dress. Although from an aristocratic family, he was a comte rather than the ‘marquis’ he claimed for himself. His military career was as fraudulent. His family connections had enabled him to be promoted, astonishingly to the rank of general, but with rarely an experience of gunfire. He claimed a heroic role in numerous battle actions, but a biographer observes: ‘None of these assertions can be corroborated either by official documents or even by a witness, while most of them are categorically denied.’ In 1814, he did not accompany Napoleon to Elba, but sided with the Bourbons and was accused of misappropriating funds intended as wages for his regiment.17 Count de Montholon has received some ferocious epithets from historians: ‘coward’, ‘malingerer’, ‘bounder’, ‘inveterate gambler’, ‘spendthrift’ and ‘cuckold’.