Underground London by Stephen Smith

Author:Stephen Smith [Smith, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780748123940
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2010-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

SPOILS

London’s Treasures

Awine cellar in the middle of London was once the cobwebby setting for cloak-and-dagger meetings held by the future emperor of France. He summoned his co-conspirators to a wine shop and, armed with a candle and a couple of decent bottles, led his allies deep into the dusty vaults. To the muffled accompaniment of horse-drawn carriages rattling on the cobbles overhead, he insisted on searching the cellars, tapping the casks and peering into empty ones, before getting down to business. At last, surrounded by cases awaiting dispatch to distinguished clients, he began to speak, dictating his messages from exile to his beloved French nation. This was not Chesterton’s fictitious Napoleon of Notting Hill but the real-life founder of the Deuxième Empire: the Napoleon of St James’s.

One of his subterranean secretaries was a man named Sherer, of The Standard. He found the work hard going. ‘It was no light job with which I was confronted,’ Sherer wrote.

Besides appeals to the French army and people, there was over a score of proclamations for distribution in the chief towns of France. The proclamations were devised to suit the tastes and feelings of the inhabitants of the different cities. During the whole time Napoleon never once left my side. Suspecting all, trusting none, even at this period in his career, he evidently thought that were he to turn his back, I should pocket one of his copies.

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