Another trained diplomat, he brought with him to St Helena a beautiful young French wife.11 Betsy Balcombe left an account of how, soon after her arrival, Madame von Stürmer visited The Briars to see the pavilion formerly occupied by her hero, and burst into tears at its tiny size.12

The French commissioner came from an ancient and distinguished family. The Marquis Claude Marin Henri de Montchenu, aged 59, had escaped France early in the Revolution and been an émigré, living in Prussia, for over twenty years. A devout royalist, on the return of Louis XVIII he had pestered him for a position. It was Talleyrand who suggested appointing him commissioner to St Helena: ‘He will bore the prisoner to death.’13 With his social ineptitude, portly build and old-fashioned pigtail tied with a ribbon, Montchenu was soon regarded on the island as a figure of fun, a buffoon.14 Napoleon commented: ‘When you have seen Montchenu you have seen all the old nobility of France before the revolution.’15

The commissioners were accommodated at the Porteous lodgings in town and took most of their evening meals with the governor and his wife at Plantation House. Montchenu spoke no English but performed excessive gallantries towards the attractive Lady Lowe, while his prodigious appetite soon earned him the nickname ‘Old Munchenough’.

A parcel of books and journals, unloaded from the Newcastle, was delivered to Longwood. Napoleon was so eager he unpacked them himself. O’Meara found him in his bedchamber the next day, ‘surrounded with heaps of books: his countenance was smiling and he was in perfect good humour. He had been occupied in reading nearly all the night.’16

Also included in the official despatch from Lord Bathurst to Lowe (which emphasised that the expense of Bonaparte’s household should not exceed £8000 a year and hoped a number of the French would accept an offer to leave) was a confidential letter from Sir Henry Bunbury, Under-Secretary of State, giving Lowe cause to keep a close watch on all correspondence to and from Longwood: ‘By an intercepted letter to Bonaparte which Sir George Cockburn sent home, it is clear that the ex-Emperor has large sums of money in different parts; and that his agents have lodged money on his account in the principal towns of America as well as in England, with the hope of his being able to get at some one or other of their deposits. We have been unable hitherto to obtain any clue to this matter: it is very desirable to discover both the treasure and the agents.’17

Napoleon looked forward to his next meeting with Sir Pulteney and Lady Malcolm. He was now aware that she was the niece of Admiral Lord Keith, Commander-in-Chief of the English Channel Fleet, whom he had met at Plymouth and through whom the decisions of the British government were conveyed. She was also friendly with the liberals Lord Holland and John Cam Hobhouse, who had protested in the press and Parliament against the severity of his incarceration. It was at this meeting that he was to learn from Lady Clementina Malcolm of an extraordinary, quite unprecedented circumstance concerning her first cousin, Admiral Keith’s daughter.

The time came for the Malcolms’ visit to Longwood on 25 June. Napoleon made a special effort to be hospitable. Lady Malcolm described for her cousin how he sent his four-wheeled ‘German barouche drawn by six little Cape horses’ for herself and Madame Bertrand while the admiral and grand marshal rode beside them. The visitors arrived and were ceremoniously shown into the drawing room, darkened with green venetian blinds. Lady Malcolm was invited to sit on the sofa beside the former emperor, a rare privilege.

When discussion turned to the East India Company, Napoleon hinted at a conflict between Lady Malcolm’s father being a slave company’s director and her own liberal sentiments. He expressed surprise, ‘with a satirical expression of countenance, at finding slaves on an island so long in possession of the English, and belonging to so rich a Company’. She admitted that she could not reply, ‘feeling it was a disgrace’.

It was from Lady Malcolm that Napoleon then heard a fascinating story. It was the talk of society circles in England. One of Napoleon’s trusted aides-de-camp, Comte Auguste Charles de Flahaut, who had been with him during the Russian campaign and at Waterloo, had escaped to England after the final defeat. He was widely believed to be the natural son of the wily and brilliant Count Talleyrand, with whom his mother had lived openly for a decade. Talleyrand’s care in furthering the boy’s career virtually confirmed the assumption.18

In adulthood, as we have already seen, the dashing young Flahaut became the lover of Queen Hortense of Holland, stepdaughter of Napoleon and estranged wife of his brother Louis. After Waterloo, Hortense sent her lover anxious letters, beseeching him to join her in Switzerland. Instead, Flahaut stayed in England. In danger of arrest as a Bonaparte accomplice, he was given refuge at Holland House. At a Christmas dinner with the Hollands he met the attractive Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, the only child of Admiral Lord Keith. Lord Byron was present and fancied her himself, but she and the Frenchman had eyes only for each other. Hortense was left to languish in Switzerland.19

Beneath the careful orchestration of Regency society courtship, with its balls, house parties, whist drives, assembly rooms and spas, was the ruthless marriage market depicted by Jane Austen, where high social status and wealth were the trading stocks, followed by beauty and youth. Margaret Mercer Elphinstone, possessing all four, was a grand prize. A graceful 28-year-old, the daughter of a viscount who was a much-respected admiral, she was independently wealthy, heiress to her mother’s fortune.