She did so by not succumbing to the aura of power that surrounded Napoleon. She brings out a side of him that people are not familiar with: childlike, charming, happy, even vulnerable. Why then this interest in the girl?Īs both the biography by Anne Whitehead and the novel by Keneally demonstrate, Betsy renders Napoleon human. She was, after all, a fairly insignificant character, one who had no perceptible impact or influence on the great man. Her story – and we really only have her word for most of it - has subsequently inspired more interest than Betsy probably merits. We know much of this because Betsy wrote her memoirs some 30 years later in an attempt to make a little money off the celebrity surrounding Napoleon when she had fallen on relatively hard times. By all accounts Betsy was, in the words of Tom Keneally, 'a flouter of mean authority', offended when 'the paltry dominated over the august'. One of the Balcombes was a precocious, somewhat untamed 13-year-old, Lucia Elizabeth, known as Betsy, who developed a teasing and playful relationship with Napoleon. For the next two months, the Balcombes lived cheek-by-jowl with the fallen Emperor.

Thus are lives thrown together, the great and the small inextricably intertwined, to be played out on the stage of history. While waiting, he chose to remain in a small pavilion near what was referred to as The Briars, a house occupied by the Balcombe family. On his arrival on St Helena, Napoleon's appointed residence, a rundown old farmhouse called Longwood, had yet to be renovated and refurbished. Such was its hatred and fear, it exiled Napoleon to one of the remotest regions in the world, the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, midway between the coasts of Africa and South America.

Her Worthy Rake by Charlotte Anne