Stop 14: Boney, the baby-eating ogre. 
When fourteen-year-old Betsy Balcombe first met Napoleon she feared that he might be, as she wrote, a ‘baby-eating ogre’. But the English teenager and the 47-year old banished Emperor soon became the best of friends within their small community on the island of St Helena. At their first meeting, Betsy had received a grilling on modern history:
‘What is the capital of France?’ Napoleon asked.
‘Paris’ shot back Betsy. 
‘Italy?’ he asked. 
‘Rome’ she replied.
‘And what about Russia?’ he said.
‘Petersburg now, Moscow formerly’ she confidently replied. 
‘Who burned Moscow?’ challenged Napoleon. 
She fumbled on this one, unsure what to say.
‘You know very well’ he chided, ‘it was me’.
Nevertheless, she evidently passed the test. Thereafter, Betsy visited Napoleon most days and affectionately nicknamed him ‘Boney’ (and got away with it – to everyone’s great surprise). 
Betsy and Napoleon met on St Helena, the island to which Napoleon had been forced into exile after his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. This time, the British decided to make very sure that he would never bother them again, banishing him to one of the most remote islands in the world – a rocky island in between the coasts of Africa and Brazil, some seventy days by ship and five thousand miles from Europe. 
The scope of his influence, which once encompassed the whole of Europe – and which he dreamed would grow to include the lands of the East – had withered to living in an English prison on a rocky island surrounded by endless sea. 
Napoleon had never been fond of the English, but on St Helena they became the bane of his life. He despaired of their disrespect and he loathed their constant monitoring of him. ‘If your names are known’ he sneered at them, ‘it will be for the indignities you have exercised against me’. Concocting various ways to outfox the English became one of Napoleon’s small pleasures, such as giving his guards the slip by outriding them. His particular bête noire was the island’s Governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, whom he hated with a passion. Governor Lowe inflicted innumerable petty injuries on Napoleon, but he also inflicted a serious one. Lowe disapproved of Napoleon’s friendship with Betsy, suspicious that it might lead to smuggled messages or – worse – an escaped prisoner. He dismissed Betsy’s father, William Balcombe, from his post, triggering the family’s return to England. Napoleon was bereft. 
Many believe that this loss triggered his descent into illness. After six deplorable years on the island, his health began to decline. He suffered terrible stomach pains, which did not respond to medical intervention. Within a few weeks he was bedridden and, at dusk on the 5th of May 1821, Napoleon succumbed to death. 
Napoleon had requested in his will that that he be buried, as he stated, ‘on the banks of the Seine, in the midst of the French people whom I loved so much’. International politics, however, would not permit this. Napoleon was buried on St Helena, in a vale he had named the Valley of the Geraniums, a plain dotted with Eucalypts and beneath a Weeping Willow under which he had often enjoyed sitting in the evenings. Mistrustful to the end, Governor Lowe had the burial ground fenced off and a sentry box installed so that the site could be watched over – you can see these in Augustus Earle’s image here. Did the Governor imagine Napoleon would escape once more?   
Some twenty years later, the King of France, Louise-Philippe the First, sought permission from the English to return Napoleon’s remains to France. A ship, the Belle-Poule, was painted black for the event, which was referred to as le retour des cendres (‘the return of the mortal remains’). Thousands of French people turned out to watch as the hearse travelled through Paris to Les Invalides, which had formerly been a military hospital and had become a museum of French military history. Here was a burial ground befitting a celebrated soldier. Napoleon’s remains were eventually interred in a great monolithic tomb carved from a single block of red porphyry. 
Though he endured an ignoble defeat at the end, his life was nothing if not fantastic. This grandly passionate man experienced the very extremes of human experience. He embraced life: ‘What are we?’ he once asked, ‘What is the future? What is the past? … We are born, we live, and we die in the midst of the marvellous.’