The Garden Intrigue

Historical Note

The best part about writing historical fiction is that the strangest bits are usually true. Submarines in the Napoleonic Wars might sound like something straight out of Jules Verne, but, in fact, Robert Fulton (primarily recognizable from grade school textbooks as the inventor of the steamboat) did do his best to hawk a submarine, named the Nautilus, to the French government. Born in Philadelphia, Fulton spent time in both England and France in the 1790s. After moving to France in 1797, he pitched his plans for an underwater naval craft to the government in power at the time, the Directory. They weren’t interested. Bonaparte, who came to power in 1799, proved more receptive.

Conquering bits of Europe might be fun, but Bonaparte had his heart set on invading England. There was a slight problem: the English navy. Bonaparte, an army man by training, had no idea how naval warfare worked. Some of his plans for the invasion of England would have been laughable if Bonaparte’s admirals had the nerve to laugh in his presence. One of his favorite schemes involved launching two thousand flat-bottomed ferry boats containing 114,000 troops and 7,000 horses, all on a single tide, within six hours, from a port where there wasn’t yet a port. His advisors were forced, reluctantly, to explain that flat-bottomed boats swamped; it would take several tides; and that it would take far more than six hours, within which time the English ships guarding the Channel would undoubtedly take defensive action. Impervious, Napoleon nonetheless founded new shipyards to build his fleet and designed a whole new port and set of fortifications at Boulogne, the harbor from which the invasion was to launch. For the details of Napoleon’s disastrous naval plans, I recommend the relevant chapters in Alan Schom’s Napoleon Bonaparte.

How could Bonaparte possibly resist the prospect of an easy way to undermine the English Channel fleet? With the go-ahead from the French government, models of the Nautilus were built and tested in the waters outside Le Havre in 1800 and 1801. The ship came complete with what Fulton euphemistically referred to as a “carcass,” otherwise known as underwater mines. Fulton’s carcass successfully demolished a forty-foot sloop in the trials in 1801. Although Fulton was able to sustain several crew members below water for as long as four and a half hours, the ship leaked. Fulton dismantled it, leaving him without a model when Bonaparte demanded a demonstration in September 1801. Although various officials reported favorably on the earlier trials of the Nautilus, Bonaparte decided it was a hoax and a swindle and refused to consider it further. Miffed, Fulton responded to British persuasion (in the form of an £800 bribe) and took himself and his plans for a subterranean naval vessel off to England, where he conducted trials of Nautilus II in 1805.

As you can tell, I played around with the timeline a bit, moving Fulton’s submarine trials up from 1801 to 1804, the height of Napoleon’s invasion plans. The rest—the submarine itself and Bonaparte’s reaction—are taken from the historical record. For those wishing to know more about Fulton and his submarine, you can read about it in Cynthia Philip’s Robert Fulton: A Biography and Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Fire of his Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream. During his time in France, Fulton met Robert Livingston (Emma’s “cousin”), a New Yorker of some distinction, who served as the United States Minister to France between 1801 and 1804. As described in the novel, Fulton and Livingston teamed up to produce the steamboat, which they tested, not at Malmaison in 1804 but on the Seine in 1803. For more on Livingston, who also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase during his tenure as Minister to France, you can read about him in Frank Brecher’s Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase: Robert Livingston’s Mission to France, 1801–1804.

American feelings towards France, as demonstrated by Emma’s cousin Kort, were decidedly equivocal. Although supposedly united by republican values, Americans found the French dissolute and eyed the increasingly regal rise of Napoleon with mixed feelings. As William Chew puts it in his article, Life Before Fodor and Frommer: Americans in Paris from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, “to the American eye, evidence of Parisian immorality appeared at every turn.” An American visiting France in 1795, a year after Emma’s arrival, referred to it as the “seat of luxury and dissipation.” They disapproved of both the Frenchwomen’s scanty attire and their tendency to meddle in politics. As always, biographies and letters provide the truest sense of opinion at the time, including those of that quintessential New York Knickerbocker Washington Irving, who wrote vividly of his travels in France.

My own New York heroine, Emma Morris Delagardie, was inspired by two very different historical characters (both of whom happened to be named Eliza): Eliza Monroe and Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza Monroe came over to France with her father, James Monroe, during his tenure as American Minister to France (1794–1796). Enrolled by her parents in Mme. Campan’s school for young ladies, Eliza became lifelong friends with Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Josephine Bonaparte by her first marriage. Portraits of Hortense and her brother Eugene still hang at the Monroe house, Ash Lawn.

If Eliza Monroe provided the beginning of Emma’s story, Eliza de Feuillide gave me the next step. Jane Austen’s first cousin, Eliza Hancock, married a French “nobleman” (the title was dodgy), Jean Francois de Feuillide, whose primary passion turned out to be the drainage of his estate near Nerac. Like my Emma, Eliza de Feuillide was fashionable and witty—and was left in Paris while her husband focused his attention and her dowry on the drainage of Le Marais. My information on de Feuillide comes from Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen’s Outlandish Cousin: The Life and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide.

While that particular house party at Malmaison was my own invention, Josephine’s country house and the tensions within the Bonaparte clan were very real. As described in the novel, Hortense, Josephine’s daughter by her first marriage, had been married off to Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis, in the hopes of providing an heir to the Bonaparte dynasty. The marriage was a disaster. By the summer of 1804, when Napoleon seized the imperial crown, it was becoming increasingly possible that Hortense’s matrimonial sacrifice had been for nothing, as Napoleon’s family urged him to set the barren Josephine aside and take a younger and better-connected wife. For more on the Bonapartes’ private lives, at Malmaison and elsewhere, there are a host of books to choose from, including Theo Aronson’s Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, Evangeline Bruce’s Napoleon and Josephine: The Improbable Marriage, Andre Castelot’s Napoleon, and Christopher Hibbert’s Napoleon: His Wives and Women. For more on my favorite of the Bonaparte clan, Hortense de Beauharnais, you can read about Hortense in her own words in her memoirs or in Constance Wright’s biography, Daughter to Napoleon.

While the specific masque performed in this novel may have been a fiction, amateur theatricals were very much a part of life at Malmaison. The Bonapartes were all theatre mad, so much so that Napoleon had a complete theatre erected on the grounds of Malmaison in 1802 for the family’s amateur theatricals. The inaugural performance was Barber of Seville, with Hortense as Rosina. As Peter Hicks describes in his Napoleon and the Theatre, Napoleon commissioned plays for his pet theatre and brought in the famous actor Talma to direct them—although one imagines that nothing quite like Whittlesby’s masque ever graced the stage.