The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour by David Ebsworth

The Russians took her prisoner and she eventually returned to France with her children, where she was received in person by the Emperor and awarded a military pension.

It seems nothing short of a miracle that she survived at all. Yet she was also eight months pregnant with twins. She was slashed by sabres and speared by lances during the same engagement, as well as shot in each leg. Her husband had been killed by cannon fire and Madeleine held off the Cossacks with a sword that she had picked up, losing her own right arm in the process. It was finally inspired when I read a factual account of French Napoleonic cantinière, Madeleine Kintelberger, who served with Bonaparte’s 7 th Hussars during the Austerlitz campaign and was caught up in fighting against the Russian Cossacks while protecting her children who were also with her on the battlefield. So the research for The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour began in earnest.Īnd I loved writing this story. A gap had opened up, a void that begged to be filled. One in which women were not confined to simply following the army, and perhaps helping to tend the wounded at the battle’s end, or nurse the fever cases, but in which there was a well-established tradition of women soldiers or, at least, of women who thought little of being in the centre of the action. Suddenly, as often happens when we research for historical fiction, I found myself in a very different world. So I began to read everything available on Frenchwomen and their relationship to the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte. And I also couldn’t remember reading anything about the French women who might have been present at Waterloo. It occurred to me that we don’t have too many English-language novels that look at the Hundred Days from a French perspective.

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The Last Campaign of Marianne Tambour by David Ebsworth