Lydia’s Lives: Beyond ‘Pride and Prejudice’ by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rickpress
Published: 2011-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

Lydia’s Memoirs – 1815

I met the Emperor Napoleon at the Theatre Francais in Paris on June 10, 1815. Within a matter of days I had also become acquainted with his Grace, the Duke of Wellington. Most intimately acquainted!

The unusual nature of my meeting with the two men led to much whispering and rumours in the years that followed, much of it to do with the Emperor. Indeed, there were those in France, once close to the Emperor, who claimed that I was responsible for the exhaustion and an unusual lack of mental alertness and concentration on detail that some said led to his defeat at Waterloo.

(‘His thoughts seemed constantly to be elsewhere,’ was how one aide described the Emperor’s behaviour on the field of battle).

Such gossips, I have no doubt, were speaking out of malice; for how can a little friendship have had such enormous consequences! If this were the case would not the Duke have suffered similarly. (I affirm, once again, that the Duke’s behaviour with regard to myself from the start was what one may expect of any English gentleman).

My friendship with the Duke, if I may claim the word as a description of our relationship, remains constant to this day, and I have been fortunate and grateful for the many acts of kindness, some public, others private, which the Duke has extended to me and mine.

As for the Emperor I saw him only the one more time, and that at a distance. He was no longer Emperor, no longer Idol of France, but a tragic figure waiting to know his fate, pacing the deck of the Bellerophon, a veteran of the battle of Trafalgar, as the ship lay in Plymouth harbour.

Since that time, whenever Napoleon’s name has been mentioned, I have thought of him stranded in his distant solitude, imprisoned by the ocean and the Royal Navy in a Lilliputian kingdom.

My involvement in the weeks-long war, the brief campaign that changed the history of Europe, the battles of Quatre Bras and Waterloo, came about in the simplest manner, as do so many other complex events in human life.

Han’s American husband had business on the Continent, and as the French monster was penned up on the Mediterranean Island of Elba Han insisted that she join Mr Warren, at least for the first part of the journey. She told her husband, with equal insistence, that she needed a friend, a companion on her Odyssey to the newly opened Continent, an area for so long closed to English travellers.

As always, she made her point – as I did when the matter came up for discussion with Wickham! His regiment was on home manoeuvres, and it was agreed there was no reason why I should not leave him with his men and undertake a journey that might not again be available to me for some years. I was persuaded to take into consideration Wickham’s chronic impecuniousity – added to which Han’s husband would be responsible for my costs!

Any lingering doubts

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