Jean-Paul Kauffmann
The Black Room at Longwood
Napoleon's Exile on Saint Helena
Translated by Patricia Clancy

National Book Critics Circle Award finalist
L.A. Times Best Book of 1999
N.Y. Times Notable Book of 1999

Now in paperback!

"A compellingly roundabout rumination on history and time, framed by the author's weeklong visit to St. Helena… The small miracle of this book is that it holds the glow of one eyewitness account against the 'dazzling, despairing' glare of history." — Bookforum

"Kauffmann illustrated the effects of captivity on humans, past and present.… Clancy, a Victorian Premier Prize-winner for literary translation, has done a wonderful job with this spellbinding book." — Library Journal

Napoleon spent his last six years in exile a prisoner of the British on the island of St. Helena. He who had conquered Vienna, Warsaw, and Moscow, a man who made history, was left to the tedious day-in and day-out of the stuffy Longwood estate — where he lived with a few servants and a small entourage of exiles (by choice) from France.

Like Napoleon, Jean-Paul Kauffmann has experienced captivity. While working as a reporter for Le Figaro in Beirut, he was taken hostage for three years by fundamentalist Shiite Muslims. Although Kauffmann's time was spent in circumstances much less glamorous than those of Napoleon (he was often chained to a chair and blindfolded in a dusty Beirut basement), Kauffmann, with The Black Room at Longwood, seeks to explore a bond. Drawing on, though never discussing, his own time spent in confinement, Kauffmann's informed perspective brings the end of Napoleon's life to light in a vivid and poignant way.

Part travelogue, part history, part meditation, The Black Room at Longwood chronicles Kauffmann's voyage to St. Helena. Although the narrative shifts between the St. Helena of today and the island of Napoleon's era, it is unified by the cruel heart of captivity: time. For the captive, the present is lost to the vestiges of the past, and the future does not exist. Kauffmann dwells on the ravaging effects of time and the slow disintegration of the imprisoned mind.

Although Napoleon was free to move about the island, he increasingly chose seclusion. He preferred to suffer the indignity and monotony of exile alone rather than under the watchful eye of his British keeper. "Captivity," Kauffmann writes, "is above all a smell, an incommunicable odor of humiliation." In the privacy of his Longwood quarters, Napoleon constantly recounted the past. Poisoned by a diet of memories — nostalgia for his days of glory and grief over his defeats — Napoleon died in St. Helena at the age of fifty-one.

Unlike Napoleon, Jean-Paul Kauffmann survived his imprisonment. He eluded the press of time by reciting daily the list of the sixty-one greatest Bordeaux wines. After his release in May of 1988, he was greeted with offers of book contracts. Kauffmann, however, wasn't comfortable capitalizing on his experience and for a while edited a wine magazine and now edits a cigar magazine. Despite his efforts to lay his own past to rest through his trip to St. Helena and the writing of The Black Room at Longwood, the trauma of Kauffmann's imprisonment lives on — some days more so, some days less — in the present and in his memories of his fellow prisoner, Michel Seurat, who died in captivity in 1986. The Black Room at Longwood was a best-seller in France, where the author lives, and won the prestigious Prix Femina.

Patricia Clancy translated The Death of Napoleon, which won several translation prizes.