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The story of Napoleon and Betsy Balcombe is an unusual and fascinating tale. A fallen Emperor who once controlled most of Europe makes friends with an impudent, pretty and spirited young English girl, just about the celebrate her thirteenth birthday. Betsy produced a book full of interest, but notwithstanding that the book wanders backwards and forward chronologically, the general tenor of the relationship between this young girl and Napoleon is beyond question, and it was of an unusual and extremely friendly nature. Napoleon's fall from an unprecedented position of power to humiliating confinement must have been an impossible burden to have lived with, and yet, despite this - or possibly be...
Lucia Elizabeth Balcombe was born in 1802 as the second child of William and Jane Balcombe, n�e Cranston. Her father was Superintendent of Public Sales for the East India Company. Balcombe and her sister Jane, two years her senior, were educated in England and there taught the French language. In 1814, the sisters returned to Saint Helena and resided with their parents and two younger brothers in a cottage called the Briars.In October 1815 the former Emperor Napoleon was exiled to Saint Helena by the British government. Because Napoleon's residence, Longwood House, had not yet been rehabilitated, he was housed in a pavilion near 'The Briars' for the next two months. Although Balcombe was f...
Young Elizabeth Balcombe, or Betsy to friends and family, found life on the remote island of St Helena intolerably dull. Most fourteen-year-olds would. Her father had been posted to that unforgiving station in the Atlantic and, being a family man, he took his family with him. Life was bleak in Balcombe's bungalow on the fringe of James Town. But then, in October 1815, the situation was transformed by the arrival of an unusual visitor. Napoleon Bonaparte, one-time master of Europe, now prisoner and exile, stepped ashore. The Balcombes, like all the islanders, were amazed. And even more so when Napoleon, taking a fancy to their bungalow (the Briars) moved in with them. Betsy, overcoming her su...
The girl and the monarch Lucia Elizabeth (Betsy) Balcombe was born in 1802, the second child of William Balcombe, an official of the Honourable East India Company, and his wife Jane, who were living with their family in a cottage called The Briars, on the remote Atlantic Ocean island of St. Helena. Betsy and her older sister were educated in England, but in 1814 they returned to St Helena to rejoin their parents and younger brothers. After Napoleon's abdication in 1814, the allied powers had taken a liberal line on his exile and Napoleon was living like a monarch on the island of Elba, between the Italian coast and his own birthplace Corsica. Escape was inevitable and a small matter for a ma...
First published in 1844, these memoirs recount a child's friendship with the exiled Bonaparte on St Helena.
Recollections of the Emperor Napoleon, during the first three years of his captivity on the island of St. Helena is the amazing memoir of Lucia Abell, who befriended the exiled Napoleon. First published in 1844, it is one of the most cited sources on Napoleon's exile years.