To stave off boredom Napoleon gave interviews to scores of people who visited St Helena as their ships revictualled. On June 7, 1817 he met Dr Thomas Manning, the explorer of Tibet, who was on his way to China. He wanted to know about the revenues of the Grand Lama of Lhasa and ‘asked a thousand questions respecting the Chinese, their language, customs, etc’. Otherwise, life on St Helena was monotonous, enlivened occasionally by the rat infestations at Longwood. On one occasion he told Betsy he had been ‘startled by observing a huge one jumping out of his hat, as he was in the act of putting it on’.122 He would also amuse himself by imitating the famous cries of London street-vendors.
• • •
From late October 1816 – a full four and a half years before his death – Napoleon started to exhibit serious signs of ill-health. This was partly because once his relations with Lowe grew toxic he stopped riding much and became something of a hermit, but also partly because he ate few vegetables and little fruit, and because he refused to take the medicine prescribed to him, only agreeing to ever-longer hot baths. (The medicine he was prescribed included tartar emetic, mercurous chloride and a decoction of tree bark, so refusing it may not have done him much harm.) He was also afflicted by a growing depression about his fate on what he called, at different times, ‘this accursed’, ‘frightful’, ‘vile’ and ‘miserable’ rock.123
Barry O’Meara reported to Lowe regularly on his patient’s health, and from these detailed summations, written weekly, sometimes daily, it is possible to follow his symptoms. When O’Meara fell out with Lowe in October 1817 over his diagnosis of hepatitis, which Lowe thought would be blamed on the British government for sending Napoleon somewhere inherently unhealthy, a Lowe-appointed doctor called Alexander Baxter, whom Napoleon refused to see, had to take dictation from O’Meara for his reports to the governor. This absurd situation continued until Lowe had O’Meara expelled from the island in August 1818. (Gourgaud had also by then been expelled by Lowe, for trying to communicate with Lucien Bonaparte.)
On October 20, 1816, O’Meara reported that Napoleon – whom Lowe insisted O’Meara call ‘General Bonaparte’ in his reports – was complaining of ‘sponginess of his gums which . . . bled on a slight touch, countenance paler than usual’.124 Thereafter Napoleon was ‘in difficulty of respiration’ (October 21), had ‘swelling and coldness of the lower extremities’ (November 10) and suffered from ‘occasional attacks of nervous headaches, to which he has been subject for several years . . . slight diarrhoea’ (March 5, 1817), ‘some little tumefaction of the cheek and red gums’ (March 28), ‘swelling of the cheek . . . extremely painful’ (June 30), ‘severe catarrh’ (July 3), ‘an oedematous [swollen] appearance about the ankles . . . want of rest at night, and frequent inclination to make water voided in small quantities at a time’ (September 27), a dull pain ‘in the right hypochondriac region and a similar sensation in the right shoulder’, a rise of his pulse from 60 to 68 beats a minute, excitable bowels, a painful cheek and a pain in his side (October 9), from which O’Meara surmised: ‘Should it continue or increase, there will be every reason to believe that he has experienced a bout of chronic hepatitis’ (October 1).
In the autumn of 1817 O’Meara removed one of Napoleon’s teeth, in the only medical operation he underwent in his life. By October 9 Napoleon had ‘a dull pain in the right side further back than before, his legs are rather less swelled’ and ‘the sensation [of] pain in the right side still continues the same. Last night he had some symptoms of palpitations of the heart . . . rather an acute pain under the scapula, and shooting down the right side, which in some degree affected the respiration . . . it is probable that the pain was produced by his having sat for a considerable time out on the steps of the veranda yesterday’ (October 11), ‘a dull pain in the right side and want of sleep’ (October 13).125 Napoleon wasn’t yet dying, but he clearly wasn’t well.
By late 1817 Napoleon was suffering from depression, as well as liver problems, stomach pains and perhaps hepatitis B. ‘The thoughts of the night are not gay,’ he told Bertrand.126 He nonetheless does not seem to have seriously considered committing suicide, despite having attempted it once at Fontainebleau in 1814 and possibly again at the Élysée the following year. The only indication that he might have thought about it on St Helena emerged second-hand over half a century after his death, in the 1877 memoirs of Albine de Nontholon’s lover Basil Jackson, who claimed that on St Helena Gourgaud ‘would . . . talk strangely, even going so far as to more than insinuate that Napoleon had suggested to him self-destruction; this was on an occasion when death by means of the fumes of charcoal were talked of.’127 (Grilled charcoal exudes carbon monoxide.) By 1818, it was true, he had written his memoirs; he was never going to see any of his family again; he complained of failing memory and libido; he was obviously ill and often in pain. He was also easily brave enough to kill himself, and his lack of religious faith meant that ‘I don’t have chimerical fears of Hell.’128 ‘Death is nothing but a sleep without dreams’, and ‘As to my body, it will become carrots or turnips. I have no dread of death. In the army I have seen many men perish who were talking to me.’129
‘Does a man have the right to kill himself?’ he had asked in his 1786 essay, ‘On Suicide’. ‘Yes, if his death harms no other person and if life is ill for him.’130 He knew that Seneca, Pliny, Martial, Tacitus and Lucan all celebrated the act.131 Yet when in 1802 a grenadier called Gobain had killed himself for love, the second such incident in a month, Napoleon sternly addressed an Order of the Day on the issue, stating that a ‘soldier should know how to conquer the pain and the melancholy of his passions; that there is as much courage evinced in suffering with constancy mental pain as in remaining firm under a storm of grapeshot. That to give oneself up to chagrin without resistance and to kill oneself is to abandon the battlefield before being conquered.’132 Although Marcus Porcius Cato’s suicide was praised by his contemporaries, in his biography of Julius Caesar Napoleon asked: ‘But to whom was his death useful? To Caesar. To whom did it give pleasure? To Caesar. For whom was it fatal? For Rome, for his party . . . He killed himself out of scorn, out of desperation. His death was the weakness of a great soul, the error of a Stoic, a blemish on his life.’133 Napoleon didn’t commit suicide on St Helena probably because it would give his enemies too much pleasure; as he himself put it: ‘It needs more courage to suffer than to die.’134 He told the Malcolms in June 1817,
I have worn the imperial crown of France, the iron crown of Italy; England has now given me a greater and more glorious [one] than either of them – for it is that crown worn by the Saviour of the world – a crown of thorns. Oppression and every insult that is offered to me only adds to my glory, and it is to the persecutions of England I shall owe the brightest part of my fame.135
It was typically hyperbolic, unusually blasphemous and factually incorrect on many levels, but living on St Helena having once ruled most of Europe was a harsh punishment indeed (though far better than the execution that the Bourbons and Prussians had wanted for him). When there was a slight earthquake that summer, he told an aide ‘that we ought to have been swallowed up, island and all. It would be so pleasant to die in company.’136 He clutched at any future political developments that might result in his release, citing ‘an insurrection in France’, Lord Holland becoming prime minister, the death of Louis XVIII, and the Prince Regent’s only child, Princess Charlotte, becoming queen of England, saying: ‘She will bring me back to Europe.’ In reality, none of these provided the least likelihood of salvation for him, especially after November 1817, when Charlotte died and was replaced as the Prince Regent’s heir by his unsympathetic younger brother, the future King William IV.137
In 1818 the Balcombes left the island, O’Meara was sent away and Cipriani, a Corsican with whom Napoleon used to reminisce, died. Before she left, Betsy noticed a severe deterioration in Napoleon’s health after a bout of illness. ‘The havoc and change it had made in his appearanc
e was sad to look upon,’ she wrote.
His face was literally the colour of yellow wax, and his cheeks had fallen in pouches on either side of his face. His ankles were so swollen that the flesh literally hung over the sides of his shoes; he was so weak, that without resting one hand on the table near him, and the other on the shoulder of an attendant, he could not have stood.138
When they said goodbye for the last time, Napoleon said: ‘Soon you will be sailing away towards England leaving me to die on this miserable rock. Look at those dreadful mountains – they are my prison walls.’ Ever conscious of the power of gifts, he gave Betsy the handkerchief of his she was crying into, and when she asked for a lock of his hair he had Marchand cut off four, for her and other family members.139
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The diseases that historians have ascribed to Napoleon over the years include gonorrhoea, gallstones, epilepsy, migraine, peptic ulcer, malaria, brucellosis, amoebic hepatitis, dysentery, scurvy, gout, an over-active pituitary gland, bilharzia, gas, indigestion, renal problems, hypogonadism, heart failure, cystitis, manic depression and various syndromes such as Klinefelter’s, Fröhlich’s and Zollinger-Ellison.140 Almost all of these can be safely dismissed, apart from haemorrhoids, a mild case of childhood tuberculosis that had completely cleared up, bladder infection with stones, scabies, and headaches, all of which he suffered from before his time on St Helena. An extraordinarily detailed book, Itinéraire de Napoléon au jour le jour, first published in 1947, records where he was and what he was doing every single day of his adult life, and from which it is clear that he took remarkably few days off work from illness. Indeed he boasted as late as January 1815: ‘I was never ill in my life.’141 He caught influenza on campaign, and might indeed have been under par at Wagram, Borodino, the third day of Leipzig and possibly at Waterloo, but not to the extent that it is possible to discern any effect on his decision-making in any of those battles.
All that changed in 1818 when he began to suffer from chronic leg-swellings, more headaches, considerable nausea, low appetite, ‘profuse perspiration’, palpitations, pains in his right side, bad constipation and (unsurprisingly) very low spirits.142 It was in early to mid-1818 that the stomach cancer that was to kill him fully took hold, although it wasn’t to be properly diagnosed for over two years. In early 1818 he didn’t step outside the house at all for a month. ‘From the first,’ noted Walter Henry, assistant surgeon of the 66th Foot, on the staff of the Deadwood Barracks, ‘Napoleon appeared to be aware of the nature of his malady, referring [to it as a] disease of the stomach, of which his father died at the age of thirty-five, and with which the Princess [Pauline] Borghese was threatened.’143 Both Pauline and Caroline Bonaparte were to die of cancer at forty-four and fifty-seven respectively, and Napoleon’s natural son Charles Léon also died of stomach cancer, albeit at the age of eighty-one.144 (Had Napoleon lived to that age, Britain would have released him when his nephew was elected president in 1848.)
In 1809 Napoleon had told Corvisart that he wanted a lesson in anatomy, so human body parts were brought to Malmaison for dissection in his study before lunch. Josephine noticed that he ‘was paler than usual and could not eat’, and persuaded Corvisart not to continue after lunch, for which Napoleon subsequently thanked her.145 This was curiously squeamish considering the number of eviscerated bodies that he had seen on battlefields, but his brief lesson helped him understand the workings of the body and ensured that now in 1818 he knew enough to recognize that his illness was life-threatening.
Various imaginative conspiracy theories have been put forward over the years alleging that Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic by Montholon and/or others, based on the supposedly high arsenic content in his hair. Yet hair samples from plenty of other contemporaries have yielded similarly high arsenic levels – such as from Josephine and the King of Rome – and his hair had high arsenic counts at several stages of his life before he went to St Helena. The 10.38 parts per million of arsenic in his hair was lower, for example, than the 17 parts per million in George III’s hair.146 It is true that Napoleon might have benefited from a better doctor than the barely competent Francesco Antommarchi, appointed by Madame Mère and Cardinal Fesch, who took over in September 1819 – Napoleon refused to see any doctor appointed by Lowe – but nothing could alter the ultimate outcome once stomach cancer had taken hold.147 Seven British surgeons and Antommarchi opened his corpse at the post-mortem in the billiards room the day after Napoleon’s death, the body resting on some planks of wood supported by trestles. In the words of the official post-mortem report:
The internal surface of the stomach to nearly its whole length, was a mass of cancerous disease or scirrhous portions advancing to cancer, this was particularly noticed near the pylorus. The cardiac extremity for a small space near the termination of the oesophagus was the only part appearing in a healthy state, the stomach was found nearly filled with a large body of fluid resembling coffee grounds. The convex surface of the left lobe of the liver adhered to the diaphragm.148
The symptoms and time-course make it likely that this was not a benign stomach ulcer that became malignant, which used to happen in the days before acid-arresting medication, but a cancer from the beginning which spread until it had taken over almost the entire stomach. The autopsy showed that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes and the tissues in contact with the stomach, but not to the liver. Adhesions in the chest cavity suggest a previous infection – early tuberculosis or bacterial pneumonia some time before – which was not related to his death. Blood-stained fluid in the pleural cavities and the pericardial cavity could have been the consequence of septic shock, which could follow a perforation of the stomach. The coffee grounds were blood that had been turned dark brown by the action of stomach acid and digestive enzymes.149
Cancer was diagnosed by all the doctors except Antommarchi, who was under pressure from Bertrand and Montholon to say he had suffered from gastro-hepatitis, so that ‘the English oligarchy’ could be blamed for choosing unhealthy Longwood for Napoleon’s imprisonment.150 The words ‘and the liver was perhaps a little larger than usual’, on the third page of the post-mortem report, were struck out by Lowe and didn’t appear in the published version, as they implied that Napoleon suffered from hepatitis as well as from the cancer that killed him.151 This has fixated conspiracy theorists, but was essentially irrelevant, for, as one of the doctors present, Walter Henry, wrote of the stomach:
This organ was found most extensively disorganized: in fact it was ulcerated all over like a honeycomb. The focus of the disease was exactly the spot pointed out by Napoleon [on several occasions in his final illness] – the pylorus, or lower end where the intestines begin. At this place I put my finger into a hole made by the ulcer that had eaten through the stomach, but which was stopped by a light adhesion to the adjacent liver.152
He added: ‘How Napoleon could have existed for any time with such an organ was wonderful, for there was not an inch of it sound.’153
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Napoleon’s fiftieth birthday was a sad affair, prompting nostalgic reminiscence. ‘My heart is turned to bronze,’ he said. ‘I was never in love, except perhaps with Josephine a little. And I was twenty-seven years old when I first knew her. I had a sincere affection for Marie Louise.’154 A see-saw was erected in the billiards room in January 1821 to give the Emperor some exercise, but it saw little use.155 In February he threw some of Antommarchi’s medicine out of a window, and vomited almost daily.156 Later that month he was afflicted with ‘a dry cough, vomiting, an almost unbearable burning in the intestines, general agitation, anxiety and a burning thirst’.157 The scenes from Napoleon’s final deterioration were wrenching for those around him. His complexion was likened to tallow and comparisons were made to a ghost.
On March 17, 1821 Napoleon saw the Abbé Buonavita, who had been sent by Cardinal Fesch, and gave him instructions about what should be said to Madame Mère and the family. The abbé was
‘dismayed at the havoc wrought by the disease on his features and was at the same time profoundly moved by his calmness and resignation’. Napoleon tried to get into his carriage with Montholon but couldn’t and ‘returned shaking with a shivering chill’. Gnats swarmed around Longwood which mosquito nets failed to keep off.158 ‘Do you not think that death would be a Heaven-sent relief to me?’ he asked Antommarchi in late March. ‘I do not fear it, but while I shall do nothing to hasten it I shall not grasp at a straw to live.’159
Lowe obstinately refused to believe that Napoleon was anything more than a hypochondriac. He was persuaded of this by a British doctor, Thomas Arnott, who told him Antommarchi was lying about the fevers, and as late as April 6 said ‘General Bonaparte is not affected by any serious complaint, probably more mental than any other.’160 Arnott did admit that the heavily bearded Napoleon looked ‘horrible’. (He was shaved two days later.) Others reported to Lowe that the colour of Napoleon’s face was ‘very pallid, cadaverous’ and that his bedroom was filthy, ‘but particularly the bedclothes, occasioned by General Bonaparte spitting upon them. He has got a cough and spits a good deal and never turns his head to avoid the bed linen but throws it out immediately before him.’161 He lost between twenty-two and thirty-three pounds during the last six months of his life, although he still had over an inch of fat around his heart when he died. His sunken cheeks are nonetheless evident from the death-mask that Antommarchi made of him.
Napoleon wrote his will on April 15, 1821. ‘I die in the Apostolic and Roman faith,’ it began, ‘in whose bosom I was born more than fifty years ago. I wish my ashes to rest by the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French nation I have loved so dearly.’162 He divided his fortune and possessions, including many millions of francs that he didn’t actually possess, between his family, servants and former generals. One bequest was for 100,000 francs to go to Cantillon, Wellington’s would-be assassin, who Napoleon said ‘had as much right to kill that oligarch as the latter had to send me to die on the rock of St Helena’.163 Equally unworthy was the accusation against Lowe: ‘I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin.’164 He stated that the 1814 and 1815 invasions of France were ‘due to the treason of Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand and Lafayette’, adding, though with how much sincerity may be questioned, ‘I forgive them. May the posterity of France forgive them as I have done.’
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