The ogre of lullabies

For six months I have been waking up on the island of St Helena. At nine o’clock I walk to my office in Bath; two hours earlier I am at work on a pile of diaries kept by Napoleon’s courtiers during the six years of the emperor’s captivity. The mind flies 5,000 miles across the Atlantic to an island I have never seen and a white bungalow named Longwood.

There are sublime moments. ‘I who was master of the world!’ Napoleon shouts as he walks up and down the narrow corridors of the wind-battered house inside which he was exiled. Then he chuckles to General Gourgaud, ‘Ah, it was a pretty empire, was it not?’ And it can be ridiculous. At dinner Napoleon comments on how much he has enjoyed the day’s good weather. No, objects Gourgaud, the weather was poor today. Marital silence.

When Napoleon fell asleep three generals, a secretary, two valets and a changing succession of doctors and English duty officers went to their rooms to write their diaries. I hate to say it but there is something of Big Brother in the way each writer grumbles about their housemates’ performance of the daily tasks set by Napoleon, whether it has been to explain the loss of the battle of Waterloo or calculate the flow of water in the Nile.

Subsequent to Napoleon’s death on 5 May 1821 over 400 books and articles have discussed his final six years. More ink per square foot has been spilt on the wooden floors of Longwood than anywhere else on earth.

But one of the reasons that St Helena is addictive is that the diarists disagree. In front of me is a page of questions on which I have tried to reconcile their descriptions of events. Did the ice-making machine, the first to arrive on the tropical island, ever work? What did Napoleon say when news came of the executions of Murat and Ney? Was he attacked by a cow? It is impossible to know who is telling the truth.