by Patrick Rambaud

The stunning finale to the award-winning Napoleonic trilogy presents the legendary figure as you have never before seen him — exiled and humiliated and vividly real. Patrick Rambaud closes his epic trilogy, which began with The Battle, winner of the Prix Goncourt and the Grand Prix Roman de l’Academie Francaise, and The Retreat. In 1814 Napoleon is racing back to Paris from the debacle of his Russian invasion. A plot afoot in the capital — to return a royal to the throne — succeeds, and Napoleon’s marshals force him to abdicate and go into exile. Octave Senecal, Napoleon’s loyal aide and savior, tells the tale of their journey south through the angry, mob-filled countryside to Elba, a tiny island off the coast of Tuscany. Here Patrick Rambaud brings to life not the Napoleon of the history books, but Napoleon the man — a man horribly bored by exile, gambling with his mother to pass the time, spearing the occasional tuna with local fishermen, and fretting constantly that secret agents and murderers surround him. He is soon planning his escape, while in France his former soldiers spend their evenings drinking to the return of “l’absent.” They won’t have long to wait.