The stunning finale to the award-winning Napoleonic trilogy presents the legendary figure as you have never before seen him — exiled and humiliated and vividly real. Patrick Rambaud closes his epic trilogy, which began with The Battle, winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix Roman de l’Academie Francaise, and The Retreat. In 1814 Napoleon is racing back to Paris from the debacle of his Russian invasion. A plot afoot in the capital — to return a royal to the throne — succeeds, and Napoleon’s marshals force him to abdicate and go into exile. Octave Senecal, Napoleon’s loyal aide and savior, tells the tale of their journey south through the angry, mob-filled countryside to Elba, a tiny island off the coast of Tuscany. Here Patrick Rambaud brings to life not the Napoleon of the history books, but Napoleon the man — a man horribly bored by exile, gambling with his mother to pass the time, spearing the occasional tuna with local fishermen, and fretting constantly that secret agents and murderers surround him. He is soon planning his escape, while in France his former soldiers spend their evenings drinking to the return of “l’absent.” They won’t have long to wait.
Glory is in short supply, but there is plenty of bad behavior detailed in this colorful, exhaustively researched conclusion to Rambaud's popular trilogy (volume one, The Battle, won the Prix Goncourt), mostly a character study of Napoleon during the era of his first abdication. Told from the point of view of Octave Sénécal, a fictional, loyal aide-de-camp, the book opens in March 1814, as Bonaparte's battered armies retreat toward Paris, pursued by forces from half a dozen opposing nations. While Napoleon peppers his generals with orders to assemble nonexistent armies, royalist conspirators within the terrified city are again working to restore the monarchy. This time, with the cooperation of Napoleon's marshals, the royalists force him to abdicate and exile him to the island of Elba, off the coast of Italy. Rambaud depicts numerous historical personages, warts and all, but he's at his best with his characterization of Napoleon on Elba: a seedy, overweight, petulant tyrant fighting boredom by abusing his staff, gambling, fretting, scheming and plotting his return—which he does, of course, at the book's end. (June)
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