What job, exactly?
At first he wants merely to snatch Napoleon from the Allies and fetch him to Louisiana, let the international chips fall where they may. Then, in the spring of 1819 (Mississippi and Illinois have joined the Union; Alabama is about to; Monroe is buying Florida from Spain; Ruthy Barlow has joined her husband and Toot Fulton in the hereafter; the Atlantic has been crossed by steamship; the U.S.Canadian border is established at the 49th parallel), Betsy Bonaparte makes a curious report from Baltimore: she has it from friends in Rome that a German-Swiss clairvoyant, one Madame Kleinmüller, has become spiritual advisor to Napoleon’s mother (“Madame Mère”) in the Palazzo Rinuccini and has gained increasing influence over both the old woman and her brother, Cardinal Fesch. On January 15 last, according to Betsy’s sources, no less an authority than the Virgin Mary disclosed to Mme Kleinmüller, in a vision, that the British have secretly removed Napoleon from St. Helena and replaced him with an impostor; his jailers oblige his aides to write as if their master were still among them, but in fact he has been spirited by angels to another country, where he is safe and content! Mme Mère and Cardinal Fesch are altogether convinced. Napoleon’s sister Pauline Borghese is not: in a letter to Joseph soon after, she confirms Betsy’s report, deplores their mother’s gullibility, and declares her suspicion that Mme Kleinmüller is a spy for Metternich. Andrew himself dismisses the vision but changes his plan to include the planting of just such an impostor, to facilitate Napoleon’s removal, delay the search for him, and forestall international turmoil until the Louisiana Project is ready.
And he is interested in Betsy’s sources; the more so when, a few months later, she follows this report with another, also subsequently verified by Pauline: so entirely are Napoleon’s mother and uncle under that clairvoyant’s sway, they reject as forgeries letters from the emperor himself, in his own hand, complaining of his failing health and requesting a new doctor and a better cook! Persuaded that Napoleon is no longer on St. Helena, they have sent out a party of incompetents as a blind; Fesch has taken to discarding the emperor’s letters, and Mme Kleinmüller to forging happy ones from “some other island.” Pauline is furious. Andrew, still wondering about Betsy’s information, asks disingenuously whether she knows that a penitential procession by this same Cardinal Fesch was described ironically by Mme de Staël in her novel
Andrew then inquires, on a sudden impulse: has she considered remarrying? Crimson, she asks him why he asks; it is her son she cares about, not herself. Perhaps Andrew has his employer in mind? If so, forget him: Joseph is a sot, a lecher, and a coward, like Jérôme; the only male Bonaparte with spirit is the one on St. Helena. And does she know, Andrew next wonders aloud, that in some quarters there is doubt as to the validity of Napoleon’s marriage to Marie Louise, who in any case has no wish ever to see her husband again and would welcome a divorce?
