Albine de Montholon

• 1. Introduction

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  Albine de Montholon was born in Paris on the 18th of December 1779, and she died in Montpellier on the 25th of March 1848. Between those two dates, she lived a life so turbulent and so entangled with the greatest drama of the early nineteenth century that her name has never quite disappeared from history. She married three times. She gave birth to at least four children. And she spent years in one of the most remote and tightly watched places on earth, accompanying Napoleon Bonaparte into his final exile on the island of Saint Helena. Who fathered her children? Whose side was she truly on? Those questions have followed her name for two centuries.

• 2. Three Husbands

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  On the 19th of February 1797, Albine Hélène de Vassal was seventeen years old and already being married for the first time. Her husband was Jean-Pierre Bignon, and the union lasted barely two years before a divorce in 1799. She wasted little time. On the 18th of August 1800, at age twenty, she married a man named Daniel Roger. That marriage would also end in divorce, in May 1812. Within two months of that second divorce, on the 2nd of July 1812, she married Charles Tristan, marquis de Montholon, the man whose name she would carry for the rest of her life. Her cousin was Régis de Cambacérès, a figure connected to the highest circles of Napoleonic France, which gives some sense of the world Albine moved through.

• 3. Questions of Paternity

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  Before Albine and Montholon were legally married, she had already given birth to two sons who bore his name. In December 1809 came Tristan Charles François Napoléon de Montholon-Sémonville, and on the 3rd of October 1810, a second son, Napoléon Charles Tristan de Montholon-Sémonville. Both boys shared the names "Charles", "Tristan", and "de Montholon-Sémonville", a combination that points strongly toward Montholon as their father even before the couple wed. A third son, Charles-François-Frédéric, followed in 1814. Then came Saint Helena, and with it the most contested birth in Albine's story: a daughter, named Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte, born in 1816. At the time, Albine was described as involved with both Montholon and Napoleon. No one has ever been able to say with certainty which man was Hélène's father.

• 4. Saint Helena and Napoleon

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  Saint Helena was a British possession set in the South Atlantic, chosen precisely because it was so difficult to reach and so easy to guard. Albine accompanied her husband there as part of the small retinue that stayed with Napoleon after his final defeat. Her reputation as Napoleon's mistress during those years of exile has endured, though it was never something that could be proven in any definitive way. The birth of Hélène Napoleone Bonaparte in 1816 gave that reputation its sharpest edge. The very choice of name for the child, Napoleone, was freighted with meaning in a household where the deposed emperor was the center of everything.

• 5. After the Exile

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  Albine died in Montpellier on the 25th of March 1848. Shortly after her death, Montholon married his mistress, a woman named Catherine O'Hara, who had borne him a son named Charles Jean Tristan. The speed of that remarriage, and the existence of that other household, quietly reframes the years of exile on Saint Helena: Montholon himself had his own entanglements, which perhaps made room for whatever happened between Albine and Napoleon. Albine's story reached a wider audience through the 2003 French film Monsieur N., in which she was portrayed by the actress Elsa Zylberstein.