“Quand serez vous sage? – When will you be wise / jamais tant que je suis dans cette isle. The notes are indicative of Napoleon’s attitude to his confinement (and he always wrote j – as in the French ‘je’ – instead of I). ( 6) The text consists of phrases written in French followed by their approximate translations in English. Alger, Albéric Cahuet and Jules Dechamps. Accounts of the document were published by J. ( 5) It was subsequently owned by Madame Henry Olphe-Galliard, from Lyons, who lent it to a Napoleonic exhibition by the Bibliothèque de la ville de Lyon, organised by Monsieur Cantinelli sometime before 1921. The latter’s grand-daughter, Mme de la Ferrière, revealed its existence by lending it to an exhibition held in Paris in 1895, the Exposition historique et militaire de la Révolution et de l’Empire. ( 4) It came into the possession of Madame Bertrand, who gave it to Mme Junot. The text reads “looks: regard Slow: lent Heavi: pesant, Threw: jetter Locked: serra gone out: aller dehors, sortir Opened: ouvert to see: voire (sic), regarder hope, good hope.”Ī much larger, more detailed fragment is however preserved in the collection of the Fondation Napoléon. It was published for the first time by Paul Dechamps in the Revue des études napoléoniennes. ( 3) It was given by Las Cases to Mr Gasc’s grandfather, presumably when Las Cases lived in Belgium after his expulsion from St Helena at the end of 1816. After the lesson, at about two o’clock, we went into the garden.”Ī fragment bearing exercises from this sort of lesson was once held in Belgium, by a certain Mr Gasc, secretary general of the company Cockerill, Belgium in 1931. He wrote a few phrases of a sort, which he enjoyed much more than the translations into French which we also tried. I explained to him the rules of syntax and grammar as they came up. The Emperor then wanted to try a few translations into English: he wrote down some expressions from dictation and translated them into English, using both a small table of auxiliary verbs and the articles (which I had made for him) and a small dictionary for the other words – which I had him look up himself. I set myself the goal that he would, in a month, be able to read the newspapers without the assistance of any of us – if the Emperor could bear the irritation of such lessons every day. Since my main aim was to make him able to read the newspapers without difficulty, this first lesson consisted only in making him acquainted with an English gazette, getting him to study the form and the way it was organised, showing him that the position of the different sorts of content was always the same, helping him to distinguish between the advertisements and the town gossip and the politics, and teaching him how, with the latter, to judge what was authentic and what was simply an unsubstantiated rumour. Las Cases again (17 January): “Today the Emperor took his first English lesson. He admitted that it was true and then ordered me to force him to take a lesson every day.” The first lesson on the island thus took place the following day. I assured him that if he had continued, following on from the two lessons which I had given to him off Madeira, he would today read every sort of English book. He happened to remark by chance that it was scandalous that he could not yet read English. We then took a few turns around the garden. On Tuesday the 16th of January, 1816, almost three months to the day after their setting foot on the island, the master and his servant had (so Las Cases would have us believe) the following conversation: “At about three o’clock, the Emperor summoned me for conversation while he was washing and dressing. ( 2) However, since most of the ship’s officers spoke French, the experiment was to be interrupted until the beginning of the following year when the ‘court’ was finally settled on the island of St. The Count gave him his first two lessons when the vessel stood off Funchal, Madeira, 23-25 August, 1815. ( 1) Napoleon first expressed an interest during the two-month voyage of banishment from Europe in 1815 onboard Northumberland. The details come from Count Emmanuel de Las Cases’s Mémorial of the fallen emperor’s stay on St Helena. In addition to the two languages he spoke from a young age (French and Italian), it appears that Napoleon set about also learning English.

Post haste one word or two