Napoleon’s Novella: Clisson & Eugénie
Few people realise that the legendary French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte found time during his youth to write a novella. Gallic Books are publishing a new edition of this work, translated by Peter Hicks, to include a fascinating psychological insight by award-winning author Armand Cabassaon.
A Brief History of The Manuscript
The version of Napoleon’s novel, published this month, was pieced together by Peter Hicks and Émilie Barthet from various fragments of manuscript found at different times. It was published in French by Fayard in 2007 and won the literary prize Premio letterario Luciano Bonaparte, Principe di Canino, awarded by the town of Canino, Italy, in 2008.
The novel’s manuscript has enjoyed a curious history. Napoleon wrote it in 1795, when he was only twenty-six, but he left it in draft form. The pages of the manuscript, probably left unbound during Napoleon’s lifetime, were scattered on his death. Six fragments of manuscript were recovered and are published in the new edition.
The first fragment (1) comprises one and a half sheets of manuscript and was originally in the possession of Étienne Soulange-Bodin, the former steward of Château de Malmaison, the final home of the Empress Joséphine. On 22 November 1821 Soulange-Bodin gave the fragment of manuscript to an unknown Anglophone, whom Hicks and Barthet have been unable to identify. A scrap of paper attached to the manuscript has the words: ‘The writing of Napoleon Bonaparte given to me by his late steward at Malmaison on 22 Nov. 1821.’ It next came to light when it was put on sale at Sotheby’s in London on 26 July 1938 in lot 364. At that point the writer Stefan Zweig identified the manuscript as a passage from Napoleon’s youthful novel and recommended its purchase to Heinrich Eisenmann, who bought it for £64. The document was then submitted to a curator at the manuscript department of the Bibliothèque Nationale for evaluation. The curator identified it as a passage from Clisson and Eugénie. Eisenmann then entrusted it to Paul Gottschalk to be sold in New York but it did not attract any buyers. Parke-Bernet Galleries put it up for sale for $2,500. It is not known who bought it, but in November 1957, it was found in the possession of the Cuban Julio Lobo. Unlike the rest of his Napoleonic collection, the fragment was not part of the Lobo museum at the time of the Cuban Revolution. Its next appearance was in 2005 in Milan, at the shop of the Italian autograph dealer Fausto Foroni. This part of the manuscript was unpublished until the 2007 Fayard edition; it appears on pages 16–17 of the new edition.
The second and most important section (2) is made up of thirteen pages and is known as the Kornik manuscript. In this edition it appears on pages 14–16, 23, 24–26, 27–28 and 29–30. It is first referred to in the Warsaw Literary Gazette(no. 14, 6 May 1822):
Count Tytus Dzialynski, the renowned Polish bibliophile, has just come back from Paris, bringing with him an extremely valuable souvenir, worthy of attention and worth its weight in gold. It is a folio volume of thirty to forty sheets, containing handwritten works by Napoleon, whose provenance is guaranteed by Comte de Montholon, Baron Monnier and Duc de Bassano. Amongst these writings is the draft of a little novel Clisson and. . . [the second name had been removed] which does not reflect favourably on his poetic genius … a project on the reform of the Turkish artillery and other documents concerning his Italian campaigns.
The handwriting of the pages sold to Count Dzialynski was confirmed by Comte de Montholon, who served Napoleon on St Helena, by Baron Fain, Napoleon’s confidential secretary, Baron Charles Monnier, one of Napoleon’s generals,and Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano, Napoleon’s foreign minister from 1811 to 1813. This second part of the manuscript was first published in 1920, and several times thereafter, notably by Simon Askenazy in 1929 and in the periodical Nouveau Fémina(1955).
The third part (3) was a four-page manuscript, which appears on pages 18–23 of the new edition, and which changed hands among well-known antiquarian book-sellers and manuscript collectors in London in the early twentieth century. It eventually ended up in the possession of British property developer, Howard Samuel, who was also a director of the socialist weekly Tribune, and who bought the pages for £2,300 in 1955. Today the pages are housed in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Santa Barbara, California. The pages had been part of the Kornik manuscript but had become detached from it before it was purchased by Dzialynski – the Duc de Bassano only verified twelve manuscript pages on 25 February 1822 (he probably did not count the thirteenth page which was only two lines long).
The fourth part of the manuscript (4), on pages 26–27 and 28–29 in the new edition, was sent to Count Grigory Vladimirovich Orlov (1777–1826) by Hugues Maret, Duc de Bassano, in December 1823. It is preserved in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Count Orlov, the nephew of Catherine the Great’s favourites, Grigory and Alexei, was chamberlain and senator before spending time in France between 1810 and 1820. He was close to Emperor Napoleon’s entourage (especially to Montholon) and he was a great collector of autographs, and gathered together Napoleon’s handwritten manuscripts both before and after the latter’s death. This fourth fragment was also published for the first time only by Fayard in 2007.
The fifth part of the manuscript (5) was only recently identified by Peter Hicks as the opening page of Clisson and Eugénie. A little over nineteen lines long, it appears on pages 13–14 of this English edition. Previously, the page, which had belonged to André de Coppet, a financier who amassed a significant collection of Napoleonic memorabilia in the early twentieth century (and also owned the third part of the manuscript before Howard Samuel), was believed to be part of a text that Napoleon had written about a historical figure named Clisson. The confusion arose partly because of Napoleon’s sloppy handwriting. The page was auctioned in December 2007 for €24,000 to a private French collector. In the opinion of Peter Hicks and Émilie Barthet this page is the most polished version of the opening of the story, and it was also unpublished until the 2007 Fayard edition.
The sixth part (6) was also previously misidentified, and is a fragment of the Orlov collection preserved in the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Also previously unpublished, it follows on from Manuscript 1, and appears in this edition on pages 17–18 and 23–24.
In summary, Manuscripts 2 and 3 are part of the same first draft of Napoleon’s novel. Manuscripts 4 and 6 are a reworking and improvement of the framework set out in Manuscripts 2 and 3. Manuscript 1 is a variant on some of the paragraphs of Manuscript 2. Manuscript 5 appears to Hicks and Barthet to be an attempt at starting a definitive version of the story.
