Footnotes

Provenance:
Osenat, Fontainebleau, 10 June 2012, lot 89
Private Collection, Paris

Exhibited:
Waterloo Memorial Museum, 'Napoléon: de Waterloo à Sainte-Hélène, la naissance de la légende', 5 May to 17 October 2021

'IT IS TWO O'CLOCK AFTER MIDNIGHT, J HAVE ENOW SLEEP': NAPOLEON ATTEMPTING TO CONQUER THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE - ONE OF ONLY THREE KNOWN AUTOGRAPH LETTERS WRITTEN BY HIM IN ENGLISH.

Whilst fully autograph letters by Napoleon in French are uncommon, this letter in English is indeed a rare survival and gives a fascinating insight into Napoleon's exile on St. Helena. Napoleon, for all his designs on the country of England, came to the English language itself relatively late in life. His battle with learning English is well documented by the recipient of our letter, Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, in his hugely successful memoir Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène (published in 1823 after Napoleon's death), in which he records their conversations and recounts daily life with the exiled Emperor. According to the Mémorial, Napoleon first expressed an interest to learn the language during the two-month voyage from Europe to the island in 1815 aboard the Northumberland. Las Cases, who had honed his English skills during his own exile in London after the Revolution, clearly had a good grasp of the language and gave him his first two lessons on 23-25 August 1815 and once established with his entourage on St. Helena, the tutorials began in earnest the following January.

Not only was it a welcome relief from the boredom of life on the Island, Napoleon's determination to learn English was also born out of necessity. Whilst being well provided for materially by his English captors, he had virtually nothing to read in his native language. As time went on Napoleon soon realised the benefits of learning English. Not only could he avail himself of the variety of English books and newspapers available to him, it facilitated negotiations with his captors, and he would now have the added advantage of reading what the English press were saying about him. It also caused him to question the enormous sums he had spent on (possibly inaccurate) translations in the past. These lessons in consequence became a regular and important part of Napoleon's daily routine.

The historian Peter Hicks has written extensively about Napoleon's attempts to learn English in his article Napoleon's English lessons (www.napoleon.org), and describes how Las Cases aimed to teach the Emperor to read the English newspapers without assistance in a month if only his pupil would commit to a programme of daily lessons. Firstly he showed him around the content and layout of the newspapers: 'the advertisements and the town gossip and the politics, and teaching him how, with the latter, to judge what was authentic and what was simply an unsubstantiated rumour' and then moved on to translations from French to English and back, making him verb tables and dictionaries and teaching him the rules of syntax and grammar.

As one might expect it would seem that, judging from Las Cases' account, Napoleon was not the easiest student, alternating between conscientious and diligent application and visible dislike for the task, frustrated by his bad memory for languages and often threatening to abandon the project entirely. Las Cases describes phenomenal progress at first, rather immodestly putting it down to his own skills as a teacher, writing 'He often asked me if he deserved the cane, suspecting that it had a good effect in schools. He would have got on much faster, he used to say laughingly, if he had had a cane to fear'. For him as teacher 'the Emperor's acquisition of English was a real and significant victory'.

Suffering from insomnia, and driven to succeed, Napoleon would amuse himself by secretly writing to Las Cases in English, for him to correct and return. Only three letters of this 'night correspondence' appear to have survived, all written within a few days of each other; one dated 6 March 1816 held in a private collection (the well-known 'anonymous' note suggesting amendments to Las Cases' Atlas historique..., a joke which Las Cases fell for to the great amusement of both parties), another from the following day held in the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris (complaining "...Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress.."), and ours from the 9 March. Las Cases describes this last letter thus: '...He sent it to me signed and sealed. I corrected the errors and wrote back to him, also in English, by return of post. He understood me perfectly, which convinced him of his progress and proved that from now on he could, in all sincerity, correspond in his new language...".

It must have been a struggle for him to put our letter together, beginning it as he did at two in the morning and finally finishing it for delivery at four thirty. The result demonstrates a barely comprehensible, idiosyncratic style of English, with random punctuation and somewhat 'wayward spelling' as Hicks politely puts it. The letter is hard to follow, peppered as it is with French verbs, for 'to cause with you', he means 'to converse with you', 'causer' meaning 'converse' in French, and also confusing the word 'bank' for 'bunk' and 'pres' (close) for the English 'press', as in urgent. Fragments of Las Cases' study aids have survived. One page of exercises by Napoleon held in the Fondation Napoléon for example consists of phrases written in French followed by their approximate English translations. Interestingly here, as in our letter, Napoleon insists on writing 'J' – as in the French 'je' instead of 'I' throughout – stubbornly refusing to relinquish the French first person pronoun for the English.

Whilst Napoleon achieved a certain command of written English, Las Cases admits that his spoken English left much to be desired, being almost completely incomprehensible. Apparently he refused to acknowledge that the same letters and vowels in French had a completely different pronunciation in English, thus creating an idiosyncratic Napoleonic style of speaking that, once formed, was impossible to correct, thus creating what La Cases describes 'a completely new language'.

As Hicks concludes, 'The documents in the Las Cases papers and that in the Bibliothèque Nationale prove that Las Cases' account... of the great man screwing his courage to the sticking point to learn vocabulary like a schoolboy, mispronouncing foreign words, but also finally becoming proficient in the language of his great adversary, is essentially a faithful account of events'.