Baron Gaspard Gourgaud was the kind of officer Napoleon collected to his immediate household — technically gifted, personally loyal, and willing to follow his Emperor into a circumstance no marshal of the Empire would. An artillery specialist who shared Napoleon's own gunner's understanding of how a battle was actually won, Gourgaud served as the Emperor's officier d'ordonnance from 1812 onward — the personal staff role that carried Napoleon's verbal orders to his marshals and his decisions to the line regiments. After Waterloo and the second abdication in 1815, Gourgaud was one of four senior officers who chose to accompany the fallen Emperor into exile on St. Helena, sharing the captivity at Longwood House through the first eighteen months. He returned to France in 1818 after a falling-out with the Count de Las Cases, but spent the next twenty years on the larger mission of his life — the campaign to bring Napoleon's body home from St. Helena to the soil of France. The Retour des Cendres — the Return of the Ashes — came on December 15, 1840, when Gourgaud and a small French delegation brought the Emperor's coffin from St. Helena to Paris, where it was eventually interred at Les Invalides under Visconti's great dome.

This King & Country figure depicts Gourgaud as senior General of Ordnance — a mounted commander in the ornate field dress of the Imperial military household. The pale blue dress coat is heavily embroidered with gold across the chest and cuffs, denoting his senior staff rank; the bicorne hat carries the tricolor cockade and a tall feather; the leopard-spotted shabraque trimmed with gold lace was the cavalry mark of his Maison Militaire rank. He carries a riding crop and rides easily, the posture of an officer who has spent his career on horseback delivering the Emperor's orders. He is one of Napoleon's actual aides-de-camp — the man at the Emperor's elbow in the Planning the Battle vignette and the staff officer who would later bring Napoleon's remains home. He rides at the Emperor's command alongside General Jean-Baptiste Bessières of the Imperial Guard cavalry and behind Napoleon Bonaparte directing the action.

Model: NA444 / King & Country / 1/30 (60mm) scale / matte finish / 1 piece set