In Burke and the Pimpernel Affair, Burke visits the Empress Josephine at her home at Malmaison. Until I started researching the story, I had no idea that Malmaison still existed and is a short bus ride from the centre of Paris. Back then, I couldn’t go to see it because of covid. Fortunately, there is an excellent virtual tour available online but I really wanted to see the place for myself and last month I was finally able to visit.
It’s a beautiful house, lovingly restored to show what it was like when Josephine lived there.
This was her bedroom and the bed where she died in May 1814. It’s rather splendid.
She actually had another, more liveable, bedroom for regular use but this one (designed in 1812 and restored by Napoleon III) was her “formal” bedroom. I wish I had seen it before I wrote the book because I’ve created an imaginary bedroom on the ground floor and this one would have been much more fun.
Visiting Malmaison gives you a strong idea of what Josephine was like. I enjoyed the billiards room.
Billiards rooms always seem a very masculine place (often explicitly so in English stately homes) but the billiards room at Malmaison was just across the hall from the dining room and apparently Josphine enjoyed a game of billiards after dinner.
Although Malmaison was her personal property, Napoleon spent a lot of time there and clearly had a hand in a lot of the décor. There is a recurring tent motif, with walls covered in fabric. The Emperor wanted to feel that he was out campaigning even when he was quietly at home with his wife. This was particularly obvious in the council chamber where he would often meet with his ministers.
Napoleon was a voracious reader — he even had a travelling library in the coach he took on campaign — and leading off the council chamber was a large library with a hidden staircase that led directly to his first floor apartment.
There are an awful lot paintings of Josephine on display in Malmaison. I notice her feet peeking out from under some of her dresses. I think she might have been especially proud of her feet which, judging from some shoes on display, were particularly small and narrow.
She was fond of shoes, buying an immense number. She spent out on dresses, too, though probably not very many like this one.
Josephine is buried with her children in a church nearby.
It’s such a shame that Ridley Scott’s terrible film of Napoleon’s life did not make more of Josephine. At one point, Napoleon appointed her Regent of France and she seems to have been a remarkable woman. It was a great pleasure to visit her home.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
If you want to explore more of the places Burke visited in the book, have a look at last week’s blog post: In Paris with James Burke.
I really enjoyed writing Burke and the Pimpernel Affair. It’s a straightforward spy story with more than a nod to Baroness Orczy’s hero, freeing French prisoners from Paris gaols.
Much of the story revolves round the Conciergerie which was the main prison during the Terror and which still housed prisoners under Napoleon. I’d often seen the building from outside without knowing what it was and I looked forward to visiting it while I was working on the book. Then came covid and visits to Paris were postponed indefinitely. Even when the city was open to tourists again, buildings like the Conciergerie remained closed and my research all had to be done online. Now I have finally made it over to France to see the places I had written about. It was great fun!
This is the Conciergerie.
It used to combine court buildings and a prison. The courts are still there but most of the cells have been lost in the extensive remodelling the place went through in the 19th century. Some remain as museum pieces.
The palace complex (the Conciergerie was originally a royal palace) includes the chapel of Sainte Chapelle. At the time Burke was there, it was used as a library. Now it has been restored as an astonishingly beautiful church.
The main entrance to the building was up a grand flight of steps which a wounded Burke flees down after the escape has not entirely gone to plan. Here it is.
Sadly, there was no car waiting to whisk him away.
It was lovely to visit the real site of Burke’s fictitious adventures. I went to Malmaison as well, but that will have to wait till next week.
Buy the book!
Burke and the Pimpernel Affair is huge fun, featuring thrilling gaolbreaks, fun with the Empress Josephine and a surprising amount of historical fact hidden away in Burke’s most outrageous adventure. Buy it for just £3.99 on Kindle or £9.50 in paperback.
Sharpe’s Assassin is presented as a story about Sharpe freeing a spy from a fortress and then hunting down some rogue Bonapartists who would assassinate the victorious Duke of Wellington. It has enough similarities to Burke and the Pimpernel Affair (freeing a spy from a fortress) and Burke at Waterloo (hunting down rogue Bonapartists who would assassinate the Duke) to make it a ‘must-read’ as far as I was concerned.
So how do Sharpe’s exploits compare with Burke’s?
Cornwell’s creation is first and foremost a soldier and Sharpe’s adventures follow him through Wellington’s military successes from India to Waterloo. His fans love the military detail in the stories and the scenes of action, whether Sharpe is brawling with an individual or part of an army engaged in a historic battle. This story is set after Waterloo, so the possibilities for military set-pieces are limited. Even so, Sharpe’s approach to saving the spy from the fortress focuses on a brute-force military approach. Burke and Sharpe both use cunning to infiltrate the fortress, but where Burke’s approach is designed to slip out quietly with as little fighting as possible (though things don’t work out exactly as planned), Sharpe, having won past the first gate, goes for a straightforward military assault. It means Cornwell inventing an action where there wasn’t one but it does mean Sharpe can get in a small battle early in the book. Sharpe is, after all, not about subtlety. The story has him working alongside a rather foppish spy who is all about subtlety but is all-too-easily fooled by the Bonapartists. Fortunately he has Sharpe watching his back and cheerfully blasting away at the French at every opportunity.
There’s an attempt at blowing up a dinner being held by the victorious British (very similar to one of the attempts in Burke at Waterloo) and Sharpe, like Burke, foils it. Like Burke, he fails to stop the villains escaping, setting things up for the final conflict which, again, involves lots of troops in a firefight with some artillery and the odd Congreve rocket to liven things up. Burke would, I suspect, find the outcome messy, but Sharpe ends up seeing off the Frenchies and disrupting their evil plans. The Duke is saved and peace finally comes to Paris.
By the end of the book, Sharpe is living peacefully in Normandy with his lady love. Burke gets no such happy ending. The real James Burke continued to spy for Britain long after 1815 and there is no sign of an end to war for him. I suspect we may see more of Sharpe in time, too. I wonder if he will ever decide that there are problems not best solved by bloody violence. Probably not. The world needs men like Sharpe as well as men like Burke. Long may they both thrive.
The books
Amazon provides a platform that is happy to host both a famous author like Bernard Cornwell and a significantly less famous one like me. Sharpe’s Assassin is available on Kindle at £4.99 or in paperback at £4.50 (it’s on offer). It’s an interesting pricing policy and explains why traditional publishers claim that e-books aren’t doing that well. It’s because they deliberately over-price them. The paperback is a bargain though.
My own tiny publishing effort can’t afford to subsidise paperbacks so I’m afraidBurke and the Pimpernel Affairand Burke at Waterloo will both set you back £8.99. (Printing isn’t getting any cheaper.) On the other hand, I do pass on the savings that come with e-publication, so the Kindles cost just £3.99.
At these prices, why not sort out your Napoleonic spy escapade needs for the rest of the month and buy all three?
