Witnesses of the exile

The emperor’s retinue also included a ‘secretary of state’, the Comte de Las Cases. The former chamberlain and future author of the well-known Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène distanced himself from ‘domestic details’. He had only come to record the emperor’s words, which he did until his arrest on 25 November 1816, when he was expelled from the island.
On returning to Europe, he published Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, which recounted his conversations with Napoleon and detailed the first years of his exile. This book would achieve great literary success in the 19th century. On St Helena, Las Cases was accompanied by his son, who would participate in the 1840 voyage, when a French delegation led by the son of King Louis-Philippe, Prince of Joinville, would come to St Helena to fetch the emperor’s remains and take them back to France.

His entire life was spent serving Napoleon, becoming his first ordnance officer. He was present at most of the great battles of the Empire. He nonetheless chose to return to Europe, in February 1818. He also would be part of the 1840 voyage. The emperor had also chosen General Gourgaud to dictate his memoirs.

The youngest son of a large family, cabin boy when he was a child and lieutenant at twenty-one, Sir George Cockburn (1772-1853) was a rear admiral by forty. Having served under Nelson and seen as a national hero in the war of independence after burning down Washington, Cockburn had the reputation of being a man with forthright, sometimes brutal, manners and a sharp tongue, which earned him the perilous honour of acting as Napoleon’s temporary gaoler. He arrived on St Helena on 15 October 1815. He was in command of the island until the arrival of Sir Hudson Lowe on 14 April 1816 and left the island on 19 June 1816. Napoleon would say of him: ‘I cannot deny him my esteem; beneath his uniform beats the heart of a soldier’. On his return from St Helena, he would go on to command in the Antilles, then be elected to Parliament and end up first lord of the admiralty.

Saint-Denis’s father was employed at Versailles in the stables of Louis XVI, where he was a servant. He had the good fortune to be accepted by the grand écuyer (master of the horse), Caulaincourt, in the imperial stables as a valet for the royal hunt and also to have his son taken on. When Napoleon wanted to add a second Mameluke to the infamous Roustan, at Caulaincourt’s suggestion, he decided on Saint-Denis. From then on, St Denis had to change his name to ‘Ali’ and dress in the vivid costume of his position. At Longwood, in his green and gold costume, he ‘valeted’ at the head of a team of six horses. With his beautiful writing and flair for instruction, he was destined to be a copyist and librarian. His job was no sinecure, as the emperor always asked for a significant number of books, and everything useful to him needed to be carefully preserved. Gourgaud requested military history works, and Bertrand novels for his wife; Madame de Montholon was well-known for never returning her loans. On 14 October 1819, Ali married a Miss Mary Hall, governess to the Bertrand children. The couple had a daughter, and Napoleon became her godfather. On the day of her baptism, he gave the child a gold chain as a gift. Ali features in the will with a bequest of 135,000 francs. He was given the responsibility of looking after 400 volumes from the library to be presented to the emperor’s son when he turned sixteen. This was not possible in the end. Those that Ali kept – after having given some to members of the imperial family – were bequeathed as part of his estate when he died on 3 May 1856, aged 68.