FICTION

THE DEATH OF NAPOLEON by Simon Leys , translated from the French by Patricia Clancy and the author . (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $15; 101 pp.) Suppose--just suppose--that Napoleon didn’t die on St. Helena, as the history books tell us. Suppose that a double was smuggled onto the island as part of an elaborate Bonapartist plot, and that the real Napoleon, aged almost beyond recognition, was disguised as a cabin hand on a ship bound for Bordeaux.

Suppose further that the architect of the plot, a brilliant mathematician, had died, and that no adjustments were made when “a single grain of sand”--the shipowner’s chance decision to dock in Antwerp instead of Bordeaux--”had derailed that wonderfully precise machine, which would still continue to turn, but would turn blindly to no purpose. Napoleon was left to his own resources.”

Such is the premise of this elegantly philosophical novella by Simon Leys (the pen name for art historian Pierre Ryckmans). He tells us a story that keeps us in suspense--what would be the resources of this solitary, sickly, penniless, ill-dressed man, albeit a genius?--against a shifting and tantalizing background of ideas.

When everyone considers Napoleon a scullion, what, if anything, makes him still Napoleon? Are his dreams of renewed glory any more of an illusion than the public’s memory of his former glory? Is the best use of his generalship not the toppling of thrones and the dismembering of nations but rather the plan of campaign he draws up for a soldier’s widow to sell watermelons on the streets of Paris?

Leys refuses to let us perch like vultures on anything dead enough to be an answer. Even the novella’s set pieces are slyly ambiguous. Napoleon revisits the battlefield of Waterloo, now a tourist attraction where every inn claims that he slept there and an amputee guide disputes his memory of troop movements--but the guide may be an impostor. After the double dies prematurely on St. Helena, claiming to be Napoleon is a sure ticket to an insane asylum--but the lunatics Napoleon meets at one such place all impress him with their adopted dignity: They look more like Napoleon than he does.