Laffrey: 'If Any of You Will Shoot His Emperor, Here I Am'

Required Activities

• Stand in the meadow and read the ground as Lessard's officers did: a narrow defile pinched between the hillside and the lake, the only way north, no room to go round — then work out where you would have put your men across it

• Look at Frémiet's Napoleon in his bicorne and work out that it was never made for this field: commissioned in 1861, cast by Charnod, it showed the emperor riding in triumph into Grenoble and stood on the place de Verdun there from 1868 until it was pulled off its plinth in 1870 — then waited sixty years, through an abandoned scheme to ship it to Corsica, before being set down here in 1930

• At the entrance, find the bronze reliefs of the encounter of 7 March 1815 mounted on two walls — they were made for the statue's pedestal in Grenoble and were taken off it, so you are looking at the base of a monument that no longer has one

• Walk the shore of the Grand lac de Laffrey — one of the twenty-five classified natural sites of the Isère — and look east to the Grand Serre across the water: the edge of the woods on its western slopes happens to draw an imperial eagle in the pasture above them, which nobody planned

• Walk to the top of the descent in the middle of Laffrey, at 910 m, and look down the road Napoleon's column took: 6.5 km and more than 600 metres down to Vizille, 12 per cent in its lower half with pitches at 16 and 18, ending in a 110-degree bend at the bridge over the Romanche. Read the prohibition signs where a flashing skull once stood, and count how many there are