Clisson et Eugénie

• 1. Introduction

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  Clisson et Eugénie is a romantic novella written by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1795, when he was still a young officer whose fate was far from settled. It tells the story of a battle-weary French soldier who falls in love, retreats into domestic happiness, and then loses everything. What makes it extraordinary is that observers have long seen it as a thinly veiled portrait of Napoleon's own doomed romance with Eugénie Désirée Clary. The questions the story raises are the ones that follow Napoleon himself: how does a man shaped entirely by war learn to live without it, and what happens when war calls him back? The manuscript's own journey answers that question in its own way. Fragmented, scattered across continents, changing hands at auction houses from London to New York, it took until the twenty-first century for all six pieces to be gathered and the complete text assembled.

• 2. The Story Inside

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  Clisson, the novella's soldier-hero, meets Eugénie at a public bath, a detail that gives their romance an immediately ordinary, civilian texture. He is a heroic revolutionary fighter, yet tired of what fighting has cost him. Marriage and a countryside retreat with Eugénie and their children offer the life he has been seeking. War intrudes anyway. Clisson feels compelled to return to service, and in battle he is wounded. His comrade Berville, dispatched to bring Eugénie reassurance, seduces her instead. Her letters stop arriving. Clisson's response to that silence is the novella's dark and deliberate final act: he writes one last letter to his unfaithful wife and her new lover, then engineers his own death by leading a charge directly at the enemy. Some observers have noted the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse, published in 1761, and of Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, published in 1774, on Napoleon's framing of romantic catastrophe.

• 3. Six Scattered Fragments

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  The manuscript of Clisson et Eugénie did not survive as a single document. It broke apart, and each fragment took its own route across Europe and beyond. One piece ended up in the possession of Etienne Soulange-Bodin, an expert horticulturalist based at the Chateau de Malmaison, which was the final home of Empress Josephine, Napoleon's first wife. On the 22nd of November 1821, that fragment passed to a British francophile, then appeared at a Sotheby's auction in London in July 1938. Hermann Eisemann purchased it there, later selling it in New York, where it eventually came into the hands of a Cuban national named Julio Lobo. By 2005 it had surfaced in the collection of an Italian autograph dealer, Fausto Foroni, unpublished until that moment. A second fragment, containing forty pages of folio manuscript written in Napoleon's own hand, was held by Count Tytus Dzialynski, a Polish bibliophile. Napoleon's personal staff authenticated that segment when it was presented in May 1822. It was first published in 1920. A third section, just four pages, circulated among antiquarians and manuscript collectors in London in the early twentieth century. British property developer and socialist Howard Samuel acquired those pages in 1955 for two thousand three hundred pounds. They are now held at the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum in Santa Barbara, California. A fourth fragment was acquired by Count Grigoriy Vladimirovich Orlov in December 1823. Count Orlov had spent time in France and was associated with the favourites of Tsarina Catherine the Great. His fragment is now at Moscow's State Historical Museum, and Fayard published it in France for the first time in 2007.

• 4. Finding the Opening Page

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  British historian Peter Hicks identified the fifth fragment as the opening page of the novella itself, a discovery that gave the work its true beginning for the first time. That page had previously belonged to French financier Andre de Coppet, who had amassed a considerable collection of Napoleonic memorabilia. In December 2007 it was sold at auction to a private French collector. The sixth and final fragment consisted of four pages that had become detached from the Orlov piece at the State Historical Museum in Moscow. With all six sections accounted for, Hicks and his collaborator Emilie Barthet could construct what they called a definitive edition. The manuscript evidence also pointed to something telling about the novella's origins: Napoleon appears to have made five separate attempts at writing the story, based on the number of handwritten drafts that have survived.

• 5. Publication and Translation

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  Christopher Frayling produced an English translation of Clisson et Eugénie that was published in 1972, decades before the manuscript was fully reassembled. In 2008, Hicks edited the newly consolidated text, and British publishers Gallic Books purchased the English-language rights. The edition that resulted also carried an introduction from Armand Cabasson, a French historical fiction author whose work focuses on Napoleonic period murder and criminal fiction novels. Cabasson's involvement connected the novella to a living tradition of literary engagement with that era, rather than treating it purely as a historical curiosity.