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At Fontainebleau on 4th April 1814, five days after the capitulation of his forces to the Allies outside Paris, Napoleon signed his abdication. By the terms of the Treaty of Fontainebleau he was banished to Elba, an island less than twenty miles long between Corsica and the Italian mainland, over which he was given full sovereignty.

In this tiny kingdom Napoleon ruled with remarkable energy for ten months, reorganizing its civil administration and its miniature army of 1,600 men, mostly Corsicans and Elbans but stiffened by a detachment of the Old Guard and two companies of Poles who had been allowed to follow him into exile. There was also a navy made up of the brig Inconstant, a sloop, two feluccas, a cutter and an open boat.

At his court Napoleon received a stream of visitors, most of them English. The French consul at Leghorn wrote to Talleyrand: ‘The English are great admirers of Napoleon. They have bought up all the busts of him in Florence. Every English captain has a portrait of him in his cabin.’ Certainly a marked sympathy seems to have existed between Napoleon and his most formidable opponents. Captain Ussher, who commanded the Undaunted which brought Napoleon to Elba, became his ‘good friend,’ and the Emperor named his sailing boat the Ussher as a mark of his affection. It was for a young Englishwoman—a certain Mrs. M.—who ardently admired Napoleon, that Captain Ussher wrote the letter reprinted in this book.

Early in 1815 the mistakes and failures of the government of Louis XVIII convinced Napoleon that he had only to land in France for his star to rise again. On 26th February 1815 he embarked in the Inconstant; on 1st March he landed near Cannes——and the Hundred Days had begun. By 20th March he was again in Paris and Louis XVIII had fled. Three months later Waterloo had been fought and Napoleon was fleeing to the south with the intention of taking ship for the United States. On 10th July he sent a message to Captain Maitland aboard H.M.S. Bellerophon requesting a free passage through the blockade. Three days later Napoleon had changed his mind and wished to place himself under the protection of British law. He therefore surrendered himself to Captain Maitland. This time, however, the Allies were taking no chances and on 7th August he was transferred to Admiral Sir George Cockburn’s flagship, the Northumberland, to begin his last journey—to St. Helena.

Once again the admiring Mrs. M. was in luck for her cousin, Lieutenant Nelson Mills, was on board. His rank did not give him the opportunities for conversation with Napoleon which Captain Ussher had enjoyed fifteen months earlier, but in the letters he wrote to his cousin and the journal he kept for her he managed to present a remarkably vivid picture of that sixty-nine days journey into exile.