The murder of Napoleon

The murder of Napoleon/ Ben Weider and David Hapgood

            “In the style of the classic armchair detective, a Swedish dentist, who is also an amateur toxicologist and ardent fan of all things Napoleonic, set out in 1955 with an engrossing theory on the track of murder most foul. But with a difference. This murder –of the great French Emperor Napoleon himself –occurred in 1821! But the Swedish dentist zealously followed “the Napoleon case” for 23 years. First he had to prove to his own exacting standards that a murder had indeed been committed (the commonly held belief was that Napoleon had died of cancer). Then he had to pick the murderer from among the retinue that followed Napoleon into his final exile on the British island of St Helena after his defeat by the English at the Battle of Waterloo.”

            At dusk, the cannon of the British garrison sounded retreat. The emperor sighed, and a doctor, his eyes on his watch, counted the time until he would sigh again. Fifteen seconds passed, then 30, then a minute. The pulse disappeared. Napoleon was no more.

            The melancholy duties of death fell first of all on 30- year-old Louis Marchand, who all his adult life had served Napoleon Bonaparte. In the terrible last months, the valet had spent almost every waking moment at his master’s bedside. “After my death,” Napoleon had instructed his doctor. “I want you to open my body.” An autopsy was scheduled, therefore, for the next afternoon, and Louis Marchand spent the morning preparing for it.

            It was to take place in the billiard room, chosen because it was the largest and best lit of the 23 rooms in Longwood House, the sprawling, gloomy building that had housed Napoleon and his entourage on St Helena. Napoleon’s bare body was carried in and placed on a sheet spread over the table.

            Shortly before two o’clock the participants and observers began quietly filing into the room. The autopsy would be an intensely political event: why had a man whose physical vigour and stamina were legendary died at the early age of 51?

            Napoleon had grown steadily weaker during his years in exile, and the cause of his poor health had become bitter issue between the exiled French and their English guardians. The exiles blamed the climate of St Helena and accused the English government of deliberately sending Napoleon there to die.

            Sit Hudson Lowe, the English Governor of St Helena, was so fearful of anything that might be blamed on himself or his government that he had court-martialled an English military doctor for diagnosing Napoleon as suffering from hepatitis, because it was a disease that could be attributed to the island’s environment.

            Of the eight doctors, seven were English, all aware of the political implications of their findings. The eighth, Francesco Antommarchi, was a 31-years-old Corsican who had been Napoleon’s personal physician for the last 19 months. Antommarchi, at Napoleon’s request, was to perform the autopsy; the English doctors would observe.

            At the end the doctors were not able to agree on the cause of death. The eight handed in four separate reports. They did agree that an ulcer existed in the stomach. Antommarchi called it “cancerous”; the English doctors found “scirrhous [hard} portions advancing to cancer.” This led to the long accepted belief that Napoleon had died of cancer of the stomach, though none of the doctors reported an actual cancer. Such a verdict would relieve Hudson Lowe and the English of all responsibility.

            The report signed by the English doctors found the liver to be “larger than natural.” That was just what Lowe did not want to hear—a diseased liver would support the theory that Napoleon’s death was caused by health conditions on St Helena. The governor asked the British doctors to take the offending statement out of the report. They reluctantly complied, but one of them, once he was off the island, recorded what had happened.

            Theree days later, on May 9, 1821, Napoleon was buried in a valley on St Helena, and 18 days later his followers embarked for England. On July 25, the 59^th day at sea, Louis Marchand, one of the executors of Napoleon’s will, joined his two fellow executors, Count Henri-Gratien Bertrand, one-time grand marshal of Napoleon’s palace, and Count Charles-Tristan de Montholon, for a reading of the will.

            Montholon and Bertrand were the only officers who had remained with Napoleon throughout the exile. During those difficult years, the two had been rivals for Napoleon’s favour. In the last months Montholon, a handsome, polished aristocrat, had won out over the quiet, retiring Bertrand, even though Bertrand had spent many more years in Napoleon’s service.

            Aside from distributing all Napoleon’s personal possessions as mementos, the will was a weapon aimed at public opinion. “I die prematurely,” Napoleon wrote, “murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assasin.”

            The exiles returning to their native land found a silent France. Passions about Napoleon were feverish, but little could be expressed in public under the Bourbon Restoration of King Louis XVIII. It was only six years since Napoleon had returned from his first exile in Elba and effortlessly overthrown the Bourbons. While he lived, it could happen again; during the St Helena years the Bourbons had been constantly searching out Bonapartist conspiracies, most of which proved to exist only in their own fantasies.

            Louis marchand settled in the town of Auxerre. As the emperor’s chief valet he still had duties to perform for his master. In a trunk was a supply of hair that had been shaved from Napoleon’s head after his death. Marchand enclosed the locks in gold medalions that he sent to the many members of the Bonaparte clan. To make sure that no other hair was substituted for Napoleon’s, Marchand had all the work done at his home.

            He kept one lock of hair for himself, and in time he left it to his daughter, along with his unpublished memoirs.

New evidence

            The seaport of Goteborg, Sweden, is a city of almost half a million people that looks out over the Kattegat Strait to Denmark and the mainland of Europe. On the outskirts of the city lived Sten Forshufvud, a tall, spare, blond man, who in the autumn of 1955 was in his early 50s. Forshufvud had divided his working career between the practice of dentistry, at which he earned his living, and research in biology. He also had a keen interest in toxicology, the study of poison.

            That Forshufvud had an interest beyond his scientific work was immediately evident to anyone entering his home. Napoleonic objects dominated the living-room. Above the mantelpiece was an enamel portrait of the emperor in his coronation gown. In front of a huge, antique, gold plated mirror was a bust of the young, long-haired Napoleon as First Consul. The etchings on the walls were all Napoleonic scenes.

            The evening Forshufvud was reading the memoirs of Louis Marchand, the last of the eyewitness accounts of life at St Helena to be published. Marchand had written his memoirs only for his daughter, in order, the valet said, “to show you what the emperor was for me.” Not until well into this century did Marchand’s grandson, his daughter’s only child, give permission for the memoirs to be published. The second volume, covering the years at St Helena, had just come out.

            Forshufvud believed Napoleon’s fall from power and premature death to be one of the great tragedies of all time. Accordingly, he had followed with particular interest the continuing, unresolved debates among specialists over how and why Napoleon died.

            Physicians and historians were still putting forth restatements of a dozen theories all based on varying interpretations of the same autopsy reports and eyewitness accounts. Forshufvud found them unconvincing. He did not believe Napoleon had died of cancer, but he had not seen a conclusive case made for any other of the several explanations that had been argued. Perhaps Marchand could offer some new evidence.

            That evening forshufvud had come to Marchand’s day-to-day account of January to May 1821, the last months of Napoleon’s life. He told, with a convincing simplicity, how Napoleon was feeling on a given day; how the patient himself described his symptoms; what he ate on that date; how he reacted to it; how Napoleon responded to the medicines he was given.

            Forshufvud began to sense a pattern. Marchand described Napoleon alternating between somnolence and insomnia; how his feet were swollen and how he complained that “my legs don’t hold me up.” Then, in the very last days, Marchand described the dying man’s response to a sequence of  drugs he was given.

            As he pondered these facts, something tugged at Forshufvud’s memory from his own studies of poison. Could Napoleon after all have been poisoned? It seemed it could not have been done by a single lethal dose: the evidence would surely have shown up either in the autopsy or in eyewitness descriptions of his last moments. But what about a slow killing, stretched out over months or even years, by repeated small doses of poison –of which, in Napoleon’s time, the most likely was arsenic?

            The pattern became clear. The alternating somnolence and insomnia; the swollen feet; the general fatigue; an enlarged liver: all these Forshufvud took for symptoms of chronic arsenic poisoning.

            Arsenic was particularly popular in France in the centuries just before Napoleon, when it was known as the “inheritance powder,” because it was so often used to speed up the settlement of an estate. Odourless and bland, it could be easily disguised by almost any food or drink. But it was also possible, with repeated small doses, to kill the victim slowly, over months or years.

            The advantage of the slow method was that, until well after Napoleon’s time, it was virtually impossible to diagnose chronic arsenic poisoning because its symptoms are similar to those of some common illnesses. If certain other drugs –notably tartar emetic and calomel – were administered, Forshufvud reasoned, death could be brought on with no trace of arsenic visible in the victim’s stomach, should an autopsy be performed. Thus, since doctors at that time tended to prescribed those two drugs for almost any complaint, Forshufvud thought it was possible for the killer to get the doctor himself to finish off the victim –the perfect crime. Indeed, Napoleon had been given tartar emetic and calomel in the last days.

            The arsenic theory would answer the most baffling of the many questions about Napoleon’s death. The problem with the most common theory –cancer of the stomach –was that cancer victims grow emaciated as the disease progresses, but Napoleon got fatter and fatter almost to the end. Obesity has been observed among victims of slow arsenic poisoning.

            Forshufvud spoke of his theory only to his wife and put the matter aside. It was not, after all, his line of work. Besides, the answer must be obvious to others. “Any pathologist or toxicologist is bound to see it,” he said.

Playful Emperor

            St Helena, discovered  in 1502 by the Portuguese and owed in the nineteenth century by the British East India Company, lay 2,800 kilometres from Cape Town in South Africa, 2,900 kilometres from South America, 6,400 kilometres from England. Ascencion Island, the nearest land, was 1,125 kilometres away and just another English-owned volcanic speck in the empty ocean. St Helena’s isolation was why the English had chosen it for Napoleon’s second exile.

            The little island –only 17 kilometres long by 10 and a half wide –had a population of 4,000, including a garrison of 1,000 (now to be tripled thanks to Napoleon’s presence). The emperor arrived on October 17, 1815, and at first stayed in a guesthouse belonging to William Balcombe, naval agent and purveyor for the East India Company.

            The family of six Balcombes lived comfortably in a villa called the Briars in the hills of the island. Years later in London, Betsy Balcombe published her account of the memorable days when she was 15 and Napoleon was their guest:

            “How vividly I recollect my feelings of dread mingled with admiration, as I now first looked upon him whom I had learnt to fear so much. His appearance on horseback was noble and imposing. The animal he rode was a superb one; his colour jet black; and as he proudly stepped up the avenue, I thought he looked worthy to be the bearer of him who was once the ruler of nearly the whole European world!

            I have never seen any one with remarkable and striking a physiognomy. The portraits of him give a good general idea of his features; but his smile, and the expression of his eye, could not be transmitted to canvas, and these constituted Napoleon’s chief charm.”

            The girl Napoleon saw was a pretty, rosy-cheeked blonde whose skinny adolescent’s body was rounding into womanhood. She usually wore a sun-bonnet over unruly hair, a bodice with lace collar, and a short skirt over pantaloons down to the ankles –a fashion Napoleon so disliked, he later told her, that he would ban it were he governor of the island.

            A remarkable friendship quickly grew up between the fallen ruler, only four months away from Waterloo, and the teenage island girl. Across the gulf of age and nationality, Napoleon and Betsy found they shared a rough-and-ready sense of fun.

            “Shortly after his arrival, a little girl came to visit us. The poor child had heard such terrific stories of Bonaparte, that when I told her he was coming up the lawn, she clung to me in an agony of terror. Forgetting my own former fears, I was cruel enough to run out and tell Napoleon of the child’s fright, begging him to come into the house. He walked up to her, and brushing up his hair with his hand, shook his head, making horrible faces, and giving a sort of savage howl. The little girl screamed so violently, that mamma was afraid she would go into hysterics, and took her out of the room. Napoleon laughed a good deal at the idea of his being such a frightening apparition and would hardly believe me when I told him that I had stood in the same dismay of him.”

            Napoleon’s officers and retinue had ample reason to resent, perhaps envy, the free spirited English girl. Their relationships with the emperor were defined by rigid imperial protocol. An officer could not enter Napoleon’s presence unless summoned by a valet. He could not sit down or even speak to him unless invited to do so. And, of course, Napoleon was always addressed as “Your Majesty.” None of these rules applied to Betsy. Her friend’s name was “Boney.”

            Once Betsy was confined by her father to a cellar room “for some mischievous trick.”

            “The emperor’s great amusement during that time was to converse with me through my grated window, and he generally succeeded in making me laugh, by mimicking my dolorous countenance.”

            Napoleon said: “You see, we are both prisoners and you cry. I don’t cry.”

            “You have cried.”

            “Yes, I have, but the prison remains nevertheles, so it is better to be occupied and cheerful.”

            Napoleon stayed at the Briars for almost two months. Then word came that Longwood, the residence eight kilometres up the winding road into the interior, was ready. Napoleon was playing with the Balcombe children when the news arrived. What was to prove the happiest time of his years on St Helena was over.

            Once a week or so the Balcombes rode up to Longwood and Betsy visited with the man that she would call “my old playmate.” She recalled that “gleams of his former playfulness shone out at times,” but for the most part he seemed “ more subject to depression of spirits than when at the Briars.”

                                                                        A single strand

Four years had passed since the evening on which Forshufvud had found, in the memoirs of Loius Marchand, what he believed to be evidence that Napoleon had died of poisoning.

            During those years Forshufvud had followed the abundant flow of writing about Napoleon, from scholarly articles to popular biographies, watching for the inevitable revelation. It did not come.

            Convinced that if the truth were ever to be known he would have to tell it, Forshufvud began to spend all the time he could working on what he was now calling “the Napoleon case.” The evidence he accumulated was overwhelming. Putting together the record of the autopsy, the casebook of Francesco Antommarchi, Napoleon’s doctor, and Marchand’s day-to-day description of the patient’s condition, Forshufvud found that Napoleon in his last day showed no less than 22 of the 32 symptoms of arsenic poisoning that he had listed.

            Yet there was no physical evidence at all. The obvious way to get that evidence was to test Napoleon’s remains for arsenic. But the body of Napoleon had been brought back to Paris 19 years after his death, and now was lying in state in the great tomb of Les Invalides –under 35 tons of highly polished porphyry.

            There was one other chance: Napoleon’s hair. In Napoleon’s day a lock of hair was a common souvenir of prominent people. Napoleon was known to have given many away. And hair could reveal the arsenic content of the body.

            The method of analysis had been practised for decades. However, it required a comparatively large amount of hair –five grams, or approximately 5,000 short strands. That Forshufvud could find, somewhere in the world, a lock or two of Napoleon’s hair seemed likely. That he could lay his hands on 5,000 strands seemed as impossible a task as pushing the 35-ton slab off the emperor’s tomb.

            The break came in November 1959, when Forshufvud went to the Goteborg Library and found in the journal Analytical Chemistry a report on a new method of testing hair for arsenic that required only a single strand. The inventor of the new method was Dr Hamilton Smith, a scientist in the department of forensic medicine at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

            Forshufvud next wrote a letter to Prince Napoleon, the current heir of the emperor’s line. The prince replied, inviting him to submit the questions he wanted to ask. In May 1960, Forshufvud journeyed to Paris with his wife, Ullabritta.

            He telephoned the prince immediately, but reached only intermediaries. After several days it became apparent that the prince did not want to see him. Forshufvud turned to Commandant Henry Lachouque, a leading member, of the Paris circle of Napoleon experts, former member of the board of directors of the army museum at Les Invalides and an editor of Louis Marchand’s memoirs. Telephoning, he asked if he and his wife might call to discuss Napoleon.

            In the commandant’s Montmarte home, Forshufvud outlined his theory and described Hamilton Smith’s method of arsenic detection. “ That is what brings me here,” he concluded. “I am looking for a strand of the emperor’s hair.”

            “I have some,” Lachouque said. “Come with me.”

            They entered Lachouque’s private museum, a room filled with relics of the emperor. In a box was a small white envelope marked, in Marchand’s handwriting, “Les Cheveux de l’Emperor.” (The Emperor’s Hair) It contained a lock of silky, reddish-brown hair shaved from Napoleon’s head the day he died.

            Lachouque offered the envelope to Forshufvud’s wife. With a tweezer Ullabritta skillfully extracted a single hair from the several dozen that made up the lock and placed it in a plastic envelope held out by her husband. “Go ahead, take more!” Lachouque urged. But she politely declined, and her husband did not insist –a circumstance he would later regret.

Uneasy exiles 

            Longwood was not a comfortable place. It was rainy on this upland plateau, and the house was constantly damp. Clothing soon mildewed; green mould covered the walls. Worst of all, Longwood was infested with rats.

            Around him, wherever he looked, Napoleon saw the concentric rings of his captivity. In full view was a camp where 500 soldiers were stationed. Red-coated sentries were posted within sight of one another all along the stone wall that enclosed Longwood. Look-outs on the surrounding heights used semaphore flags to relay news of the captive’s whereabouts. Between the armed peaks Napoleon could see five English warships guarding the island’s water.

            Napoleon’s immediate goal was to keep his name from being forgotten in the world he had once dominated. Fot that, the exiles had to penetrate the censorship that governed all correspondence in and out of Longwood. Napoleon seldom left the residence. But the others would frequently ride the eight kilometres down to the tiny port of Jamestown, where they picked up news and mingled with the sailors from passing ships. Franceschi Cipriani in particular –the dark, fearless Corsican who had been around the Bonaparte family since childhood –served as Napoleon’s eyes and ears, while valet Louis-Etienne Saint-Denis was charged with copying messages that were smuggled out.

            In mid-morning, after Napoleon had been riding, Barry O’Meara, his doctor, was sometimes summoned. Napoleon felt no need for O’Meara’s proffessional skills in these early days; his health was good. But O’Meara was valued as a source of local gossip.

            Lunch, usually around 11, was either in Napoleon’s room or, if the weather was good, in the garden. The food was prepared in the Longwood kitchens by cooks Napoleon had brought with him. But they did not serve it: that job was reserved to Louis Marchand and two trusted assistant valets. Napoleon would drink a glass or two of watered wine, rarely more, from his personal supply of vin de Constance, the highly regarded South African wine; the others at the table made do with whatever ordinary wine was available.

            Napoleon tried lunching with his officers, but their incessant quarrelling wore on his nerves. The officers’ problem was underemployment. There was too little work to go around. Only Count Emmanuel de Las Cases, the eldest among them, who bore the brunt of Napoleon’s dictating, was kept fairly busy. Las Cases had joined Napoleon in the last days of his reign, apparently with the objective of becoming his historian.

            Grand Marshal Bertrand was unhappy because he was being superseded by Montholon; morose, he said little and stayed with his family when he could. Bertrand had been with Napoleon ever since Italy, and in Paris was grand marshal of the palace. By rights he should have been incharge of the household. But at the insistence of his tall blonde wife, Fanny, who wanted to keep her distance from Napoleon, piqued, put the household management in the hands of Montholon, the elegant, curly-haired courtier who shared Napoleon’s exile.

The appointment of William Balcombe, Betsy’s father, as food supplier reassured Napoleon. He was certain the English would prefer him dead and suspected they might take measures to make that wish a reality. He considered the possibility of poison –he said doctors and chemists had warned him to be particularly wary of wine and coffee –but dismissed it under present circumstances: “There’s no danger of poison. Balcombe supplies the food, and O’Meara and Poppleton [the resident English officer] are honest people who wouldn’t lend themselves to such a thing.”

Meeting in Glasgow

            Back in Sweden from Paris, Forshufvud telephoned Hamilton Smith in Glasgow. Without asking any questions, Smith promptly agreed to test the hair.

            Forshufvud carefully wrapped the strand of hair and posted it to Scotland in a registered enveloped. In July 1960, he had a reply:

            “The sample gave a value of 10.38 micrograms of arsenic per gram of hair when analysed by my method. This shows that the subject has been exposed to relatively large amounts of arsenic.”

            The normal amount of arsenic in human hair is about 0.8 parts per million. Napoleon’s hair at the time of his death contained 13 times the normal amount of arsenic!

            After a moment of self-congratulation, Forshufvud began to ponder the future. A long road lay ahead. Already he could hear the voices of the sceptics: it was only a single test. The sample was too small. Perhaps the hair had been contaminated. Perhaps the arsenic came from the environment. Maybe the hair was not even Napoleon’s.

            Yes, there was still much work to be done. He needed more hair, more tests. He needed to know more about what could safely be concluded from the test, and what could not. Most of all, he needed to talk to Hamilton Smith face to face.

            He flew to Glasgow in August, and after a tour of Smith’s laboratory, the men sat, over the inevitable cups of tea, while the short, sandy-haired Glasgow scientist explained his technique. The hair was weighed and sealed in a polyethylene container. Then the sample and a standard arsenic solution were both irradiated for 24 hours. A comparison of the two samples showed the hair’s arsenic content, indicating the presence of arsenic in the body. The new technique had been tested at length and was accurate. Unfortunately, however, the test destroyed the hair, so no further testing was possible.

            Hamilton Smith had one question: “Can you tell me who was the victim of this crime?”

            Forshufvud replied slowly, “The hair belonged to Emperor Napoleon the First.”

            Later Forshufvud recalled that Smith’s face turned white: “pale like a corpse,” as he put it. It occurred to Forshufvud that Smith must be thinking it was the English who had poisoned Napoleon. A Briton might well be dismayed by a foreign visitor’s laying such a monstrous crime on his nation’s doorstep.

            It was Forshufvud’s turn now to ask a question: could the arsenic have come from an external source? Smith then told Forshufvud about a recent improvement: he could now analyse a hair in sections. Thus, if arsenic was absorbed in a steady amount from the environment –something in the victim’s room, say –the analysis would show a roughly constant amount from section to section. If, on the other hand, arsenic entered the body at intervals in large amounts, a graph would show jagged peaks and valleys. Since hair grows about .35 millimetres a day, it would be possible to calculate the time between the peaks.

            The implications were enourmous: the doses of arsenic Napoleon consumed could be calculated backwards along the length of his hair, and then compared with the existing written records of the dying man’s symptoms day to day. The evidence would be conclusive.

            Forshufvud needed more hair. Lachouque had offered it before; surely he would offer it again.

            At a meeting on April 10, 1961, at the French army’s historical section in Paris, Forshufvud presented his case. The group, which included two military doctors and the army’s chief pharmacist, listened silently, and they seemed to him to be both interested in his thesis and sympathetic to it. Indeed, Lachouque was forthcoming, and Forshufvud made arrangements to have Napoleon’s hair examined by a French expert. But before the test began, Lachouque unexpectedly reclaimed the sample.

            Forshufvud thought he knew why. The French must have started thinking about the next question: who was the assassin? It would be tempting to try to blame the English. But given the circumstances of life at St Helena it seemed unlikely that the English could have poisoned Napoleon without poisoning the whole household.

            The conclusion was inescapable. France’s great hero was struck down by a traitor among those closest to him, an unappetizing prospect for a Frenchman to contemplate.

            Against his better judgement, Forshufvud decided to publish his incomplete theory, to tell the world and pray that someone would come forward with more evidence. Dozens of locks had been collected during Napoleon’s life and at his death. Among the present owners some must be willing to give up a few strands in the interests of science and history.

“A murderous climate”

            On July 11, 1816, Napoleon and Gaspard Gourgaud, one of his officers called on Albine de Montholon, who had given birth to a daughter a few weeks earlier. They found her reading the story of the Marquise de Brinvilliers, one of the most celebrated murder cases in the history of France.

            In 1676, under the reign of Louis XIV, the marquise was convicted and executed for poisoning her father and both her brothers with arsenic. The book Albine de Montholon was reading was in effect, a step-by-step description of how to kill people with arsenic in aa way least likely to be discovered. Among the early symptoms the marquise’s victims displayed were headache, loss of appetite, vomitting, itching and chest pains. When the marquise tried to poison her husband, he complained of weakness of the legs; he found it difficult to stand and painful to walk.

            Gaspard Gourgaud was the most discontented of Napoleon’s officers. Las Cases had his work, Bertrand and Montholon had their wives and children. But Gourgaud had no one. This big, swarthy man in his early 30s was full of energy and emotion that he could not expend. Napoleon put Gourgaud in charge of the stable of 12 horses, but grooms did the work, so his duties took little time and even less energy. He rode furiously around Longwood plain. He quarrelled, mostly with Montholon, complained to Napoleon and sulked.

            Napoleon and Hudson Lowe, the new governor who had arrived in the spring of 1816, got on badly almost from the start. The anxiety ridden governor was terrified that he would bungle his awesome responsibility and that Napoleon would escape, most likely by raising a revolt among the inhabitants and garrison. To counter such improbable plans, he issued new rules and enforced old ones ignored by his more confident predecessor.

            Most of the regulations were designed to restrict Napoleon’s ability to talk with the islanders and write to the outside world. Aware that the exiles were regularly smuggling letters past his censors, Lowe proclaimed it a crime for islanders to deal with anyone at Longwood without his permission. He reduced the area in which Napoleon could ride without an escort, and revived a rule, never previously enforced, that an English officer must see Napoleon at least twice a day.

            In the pettiest move of all. Lowe told the French exiles that Longwood’s annual budget must be reduced from £12,000 to £8000. Napoleon seized the oppurtunity to embarrass the English authorities: he ordered that the imperial silver be sold.

            Cipriani waited on the quay in Jamestown for a crowd to assemble before displaying the platters and dishes. He responded to questions about the emperor’s welfare by exclaiming, “He’s well enough for someone who must sell his silverware to live.” Napoleon could count on the news travelling to London, where he hoped to gain the sympathy of the English public.

            Napoleon’s response to Lowe’s repressive rules was to frustrate the governor and, failing that, to use the regulations as a grievance against the English in general. When his riding area was reduced, Napoleon told his doctor, O’Meara, who he knew would tell the governor that the English would bear the blame for killing him by depriving him of exercise. He nullified the rule that he must be seen twice a day simply by staying in his two rooms at Longwood for days at a time.

            But Napoleon paid dearly for the fued with Lowe. The narrow circle of his captivity was shrinking. Visitors became rare because of a dispute over who should sign their passes. And the emperor’s health was suffering.

            In May, Napoleon had complained of gout and told O’Meara that “my legs refuse to work for me.” He was constantly cold and the sunlight gave him a headache. His gums began to bother him, and O’Meara found that they were “spongy, pale, and bled on the slightest touch.” The recurring symptoms were attributed by O’Meara partly to “a murderous climate,” a catch-all interpretation for whatever could not otherwise be explained.

Perfect match

            Forshufvud and Hamilton Smith, with Anders Wassen, a Swedish toxicologist, wrote an article dealing the results of the single test performed by Smith. It appeared in the in the October 14, 1961, issue of the British scientific journal Nature. The article named Napoleon as the victim. The first reactions came from Napoleon experts who denounce the whole theory. Forshufvud had expected no less.

            Then, only two weeks after the article appeared, Forshufvud got a call from Clifford Frey, a Swiss textile manufacturer. Frey owned a lock of Napoleon’s hair –50 strands –that had originally be longed to Jean-Abraham Noverraz, the valet who shaved Napoleon’s head the day after his death. Frey, would be happy to provide a few strands for testing. He delivered the hair to Glasgow himself.

            While waiting for Hamilton Smith’s report, Forshufvud traced out a time line for the final seven months of Napoleon’s life, from late September 1820, when his health deteriorated rapidly, to the end on May 5,1821. He listed every symptom Napoleon suffered on the date it was reported by Dr Antommarchi, Marchand or one of the other witnesses. Once complete, the line was nearly a metre long, and Napoleon’s last illness fell into perspective.

            Symptoms did not appear spread out evenly along the line, but were clustered in groups between periods of partial recovery. The evidence was that in those seven months Napoleon suffered six episodes of acute arsenic poisoning, the last in March. After that, the nature of his symptoms seemed to change. He recovered somewhat in mid-April when he wrote his will; the final illness then started and lasted about two weeks.

            Smith’s report arrived early in December. He had extracted 20 hairs from the lock. To some scraps of  hair Smith had applied his old test, which measured only the total arsenic content. These showed levels of 3.27 and 3.75 parts per million—between four and five times the normal amount of arsenic in human hair.

            Two hairs –one 13, the other 9 centimetres in length –had been long enough for sectional analysis. After being irradiated, they were returned to Hamilton Smith, who fixed them on paper and cut them into five-millimetre pieces. He then determined the arsenic content of each piece. The graph for the longer hair was a jagged line ranging from a low of 2.8 to a high of 51.2. The arsenic in the shorter hair ranged from 1.06, not much above normal, to a high of 11. All told, Smith performed 140 tests on this batch of hair. The graphs produced were the physical evidence that Napoleon was not accidently killed by some source of arsenic in his environment.

            Forshufvud took out his time line of taped-together sheets and laid it out on the floor. With Smith’s graph, he calculated back along the line of growth of the hair from the day it was cut, May 6. Each five-millimetre section represented about 15 days of Napoleon’s life. Forshufvud compared the peaks and valleys of Smith’s graphs with the clusters of symptoms and and periods of recovery on his time line. They matched the peaks of arsenic in the hair coinciding with clusters of acute symptoms.

            Forshufvud’s effort to get more evidence bore further fruit a short time later when he received a letter from Dame Mabel Brookes, an Australian author and, more important, Betsy Balcombe’s grand-niece. She had seen a report of the Nature article. Dame Mabel owned a lock of hair Napoleon had given Betsy during her farewell visit to Longwood on March 16, 1818. She was sending a sample to Glasgow.

            The hair, two strands analysed in three one-centimetre sections, showed an arsenic content ranging from 67 to 26 parts per million, further evidence of deliberate poisoning.

            Since, according to Betsy’s memoirs, the hair was cut on the day of Betsy’s last visit to Longwood, it must have grown in 1817 or early 1818. This allowed Forshufvud to rule out as murder suspects those who came later to St Helena, particularly Dr Antommarchi, who did not arrive until 1819.

            Dame Mabel was most pleased with these results. She had grown up believing that Napoleon had been murdered. It was a family tradition that William Balcombe had suspected poison.

Departures

            Napoleon’s health had taken a turn for the worse. In October 1817 he complained to O’Meara of a dull pain immediately under the cartilages of the ribs, which never was there before. O’Meara thought this might be a symptom of hepatitis. Two weeks later the doctor reported that Napoleon was never free from an uneasy sensation in the right side; his appetite was diminished; his legs still swelled, especially towards night.

            When the Balcombes saw Napoleon at about this time, Betsy wrote of his illness: “The havoc and change it had made in his appearance was sad to look upon. 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 his shoes; he was so weak that without resting one hand on a table, and the other on the shoulder of an attendant, he could not have stood. My mother observed, when we had left, that death was stamped on every feature.”

            At times Napoleon’s repeated illnesses revived his fear of poison, which usually centred on the wine.

            In June, Gourgaud had found a strange flavour in a bottle of  Napoleon’s wine. Gourgaud advised him not to be the only one to drink his wine because no one would dare poison them all –it would attract too much attention.

            Napoleon’s health was only one of his worries. His entourage was slowly dwindling. In February 1818, after a year of increasing bitterness with the household, Gaspard Gaurgaud left, the second of Napoleon’s four officers to go. (Las Cases had sailed away in November 1816.) Young and hot tempered, Gaurgaud was unable to keep his mouth shut. When he complained that he had no woman while Montholon and Bertrand had wives, Napoleon said, “Bah! Women! If you don’t think about them, you don’t need them. Be like me.”

            But Gaurgaud did not think his master did without women. He believed Albine de Montholon was Napoleon’s mistress, and he let Napoleon know what he thought. On one occasion he surprised Albine going to visit Napoleon, who was not dressed, in his bedroom. When Gaurgaud told this to her husband, Montholon stammered, “I don’t know. I’m not saying no.”

            The end came at a stormy scent. The issue was the Montholons. Napoleon said he would treat them as he pleased, and so Gourgaud decided to leave St Helena, giving bad health as the reason.

            In late February Napoleon suffered another, much more serious loss. One evening during dinner Cipriani suddenly fell to the floor writhing in pain. Two days later he was dead –O’Meara said “of inflammation of the bowels.” Cipriani was listed as a servant; there was no autopsy; no questions were asked about his abrupt death.

            The next month the Balcombes sailed from St Helena, ostensibly because Mrs Balcombe was in poor health, but in fact because Hudson Lowe thought they were entirely too friendly with Napoleon. In William Balcombe, Napoleon lost a valuable link to the outside world, and in the family, he lost his only friends among the English colony on the island.

            Barry O’Meara was next. Napoleon was sorry to see the young doctor go. With Cipriani dead and Balcombe gone, O’Meara was one of his few remaining sources of information about the world outside, and their conversations helped while away the long days.

            A year later, Albine de Montholon left, taking with her the three Montholon children, and leaving behind questions that would never be answered: was she Napoleon’s mistress, as Gaurgaud had maintained? Was her daughter, Napoleone, born on the island, the emperor’s child? Whatever her relationship to Napoleon, it was certain that her departure made the slow days still more empty.

            When he realized Albine was determined to leave, Napoleon told her husband he could go with her, but Montholon refused. Montholon was now emerging as the dominant figure among Napoleon’s followers. He had completely supplanted his rival, the retiring, morose Bertrand, who also wished to leave. With his family gone, Montholon could spend all his time at Napoleon’s side, and he never complained.

Answers for sceptics

            Throughout his investigation, Sten Forshufvud had encountered many pointed questions –some asked by sceptics, some by himself –probing and refuting his theory of Napoleon’s death. Finally in 1974, his research complete, he was ready to answer them with some certainty.

            The evidence for arsenic poisoning is so clear. Why had no one before you made the diagnosis?

            “I put that question to Henri Griffon, the poison expert at the Paris police laboratory. Griffon said that in no case of arsenic poisoning –and he has investigated many –did a physician diagnose arsenic correctly and in time. The symptoms are characteristic of several diseases more familiar to physicians; one must see them in their totality to make the right diagnosis. Certainly a doctor is more comfortable with disease than with the idea of poison.”

            But Dr Antommarchi was on the spot. And poisoning by arsenic was certainly a common enough method of murder in those days. Why didn’t he suspect poison?

            “We must remember the difference between acute and chronic arsenic poisoning. A slow chronic poisoning causes symptoms that were not well understood by physicians of that time. In fact, the syndrome of chronic arsenic poisoning was not understood until 1930.”

            But how about the medical men and historians who have studied the problem in more recent years?

            “Until Hamilton Smith invented and used his hair-analysis technique, there had been no direct physical evidence that Napoleon was poisoned. The memoirs that added so much detail to the story of Napoleon’s last days –those of Bertrand and above all Louis Marchand –were only published in 1949 and 1955. The question of arsenic was not raised, and so it had not been answered. Other theories of  Napoleon’s death were advanced and won their devoted supporters. Each specialist had taken his position.

            “All of the people who most strongly attack the arsenic theory have written books or articles arguing the other theories. To my knowledge, no toxicologist or pathologist has disagreed with me, nor has any criminologist or expert in forensic medicine, and several of them have backed me up. But history is owned by the historians.”

            Your critics have questioned the origin of the hairs. How can we know they really belonged to the emperor?

            “We know from the unusual appearance of the hair and its arsenic content that they all came from one person. The hair fits the description of the emperor’s. But is it Napoleon’s? Consider its origin –Lachouque in Paris, Frey in Switzerland, Dame Mabel in Australia, plus two others. If the hair is false, then hairs from one person would have to have got into the hands of each of those people,scattered around the world and all strangers to each other. The possibility is slim.”

            Why did the poisoning take so long? Why not kill Napoleon at once with one massive dose?

            “To understand what happened, we must look at just what it was that the Bourbons feared. They feared Napoleon himself, of course, but even more they feared the Bonapartist movement. Even while the emperor was still alive, some of the conspirators against the Bourbons invoked the name of I’Aiglon, Napoleon’s son, rather than the emperor himself.”

            “Suppose the Count d’Artoris, the next in succession to the Bourbon throne, had ordered an assasin to kill Napoleon with a single dose. Poison would certainly be suspected, there would be an autopsy, and the evidence would reveal the presence of arsenic. Imagine what the Bourbons could expect when the news reached France: perhaps a popular revolt, led by Napoleon’s veterans, that would end their rule forever. It was essential that the poisoning be slow enough to make it seem that Napoleon died a natural death.

            “A gradual poisoning also served the purpose of keeping Napoleon quiet. Finally there was a personal consideration of importance to the assassin. I would not have liked to have been at Longwood when it was discovered I had poisoned the emperor. No doubt the assassin would have been torn to pieces by Napoleon’s loyal followers, instead of sailing away unsuspected.”

Closing the net

            Forshufvud was now ready to unmask the murderer. He had already eliminated as suspects those who did not actually live at Longwood because, while they could have poisoned the household, they could not have targeted Napoleon alone. That cleared the English, and Bertrand. He had also ruled out those who were not present for the entire exile, because the hairs had proved that Napoleon was poisoned throughout the five and a half years on St Helena. This exonerated Las Cases, Gourgaud, O’Meara, Albine de Montholon, Cipriani and Dr Antommarchi.

            The standard way of administering arsenic was through food or drink. Pierron, the butler, was at Longwood throughout the exile. He could easily have poisoned Napoleon, but not Napoleon alone, Forshufvud reasoned. Pierron supervised the food preparation, but it was served by the valets; Napoleon would take food from no one else. Pierron could not know which portions would be eaten by the emperor.

            What, then, about the three valets: Marchand, Saint-Denis and Noverraz? The latter two could be ruled out because they did not serve the food consistently. And Noverraz was ill in bed during one period when Napoleon was being poisoned.

            That left only two suspects: Montholon and Marchand –Napoleon’s two most faithful followers. This was ironic, but also quite natural: only the most faithful would have had the constant access to Napoleon required to carry out the assassin’s mission.

            Forshufvud examined the background of the two suspects and asked himself why each went to St Helena. Marchand had served Napoleon his entire adult life. His mother had served in the palace, and during Napoleon’s first exile went to Vienna to care for the emperor’s son. Neither Marchand nor his family had any Royalist connection. It was natural that he would follow the emperor.

            Montholon was from the old aristocracy. He was an officer who did no fighting. Napoleon had refused Montholon a promotion and denied him permission to marry Albine, then dismissed him when he married her anyway. When Napoleon abdicated and went to Elba, Montholon sought to gain favour with the Bourbons.

            Count de Semonville, Montholon’s stepfather, was close to the Count d’Artois, Louis XVIII’s brother. No doubt through that connection Montholon was made a general during the first Bourbon Restoration. Before he could assume his commission, he was charged with having stolen 5,970 francs from his soldiers’ pay a few months earlier –a serious crime. But Montholon was never court-martialled.

            Montholon next appeared in Napoleon’s entourage after Waterloo, in court chamberlain’s uniform. Why had this pleasure loving young aristocrat suddenly joined a lost cause? Why was he eager to go to St Helena? Why Forshufvud asked, did he want to leave the good life in France, where his kind were now in power, to spend his best years on a remote island in the service of a man to whom he owed nothing?

            Forshufvud considered Montholon’s behaviour at St Helena: he had refused to react to Albine’s intimacies with Napoleon, even when Gourgaud taunted him; he never complained, never asked to leave.

            Forshufvud saw only one explanation for such strange behaviour –Montholon was sent for the single purpose of killing the emperor. Surely the man who gave the order was d’Artois, who had already masterminded other assassination plots on Napoleon’s life. D’ Artois might well have told Montholon that if he did not accept the mission he could be sent to prison for his earlier theft.

            The question of method provided Forshufvud with further evidence. Montholon was Longwood’s wine steward –he held the key to the cupboard in which the wine was kept. The wine usually arrived at Longwood in casks. It would be simple for Montholon to put arsenic in the cask itself, before the wine was bottled. It would be safe: Montholon was far less likely to be caught doing that than poisoning the food. Food would have to be poisoned each time, but one application in the cask would guarantee that Napoleon would be poisoned for weeks or months to come –and with a predictable dose, since Napoleon was a moderate drinker.

            There was more. Napoleon once made a gift of a bottle of his wine to Gourgaud who became afflicted with symptoms similar to the emperor’s.

            The heart of the matter lay in the last phase of the emperor’s life, those first months of 1821, when the assassin adopted the classical method of killing his victim. He got a physician to prescribe drugs, otherwise harmless, that finish off the person already weakened by the slow arsenic poisoning. In eyewitness accounts of those last months, Forshufvud found the final proof that Napoleon was murdered, and that Montholon was his assassin.

  The final blow

            By the beginning of 1821, Napoleon was extremely weak, suffering from fits of depression and severe pains in the stomach. Throughout this period, Montholon repeatedly told Hudson Lowe that Antommarchi was not equal to saving Napoleon in the present state of his illness, and that he would like a doctor from Paris. He repeated this request to Antommarchi himself, adding, “ It is up to the king to choose one.”

            Antommarchi was dangerous to the assassin in two ways. First, he was trained in anatomy and could do a better autopsy than most doctors. Second, since he was Corsican, he felt no loyalty to either the British or French monarchy and would not fear to disclose the finding of poison. A French doctor, chosen by the Bourbons, would know better than to diagnose poison.

            Forshufvud found it impossible to believe that Napoleon, who was afraid of English doctors, would put his life in the hands of a physician handpicked by the Bourbons, when, as he frequently observed, the Count d’Artois had repeatedly tried to have him assassinated. Montholon had to be lying to Lowe. He , not Napoleon, wanted a French doctor.

            By mid-February Napoleon felt better, but late in the month he had a sudden relapse. Antommarchi reported: “Dry cough. Vomitting. Sensation of heat in the intestines that is almost unbearable.” (The hair analysis showed a peak arsenic content at this time.) Finally, in March, at the urging of Bertrand, Montholon and Antommarchi, the emperor took an emetic to combat the symptoms.

            Physicians of the timed hoped the emetic, by inducing vomitting, would rid the body of the ills for which they had no other treatment. Tartar emetic, the commonest medication, is a compound of antimony. The antimony irritates the interior mucous lining, eventually inhibiting the normal vomitting reflex with which the stomach protects itself. The stomach becomes unable to expel poisons.

            Hamilton Smith tested some of Napoleon’s haircut at death for its antimony content. The results showed a relatively high antimony level. Equally important, a sectional analysis showed that the antimony content varied over time, evidence that the medication was continued, further weakening Napoleon’s stomach.

            Late in April Napoleon decided to switch from liquorice syrup to orgeat. Orgeat was a drink made with sweet almonds, to which bitter almonds were usually added for spice. Without the bitter almonds, orgeat was harmless. With, them and in combination with calomel, it could be a deadly poison.

            During this time Napoleon improved slightly and worked on the final codicils of his will. Late in the month the governor sent a case of bitter almonds. The orgeat, which Napoleon went on drinking, was now potentially a fatal potion.

            On May 3 Hudson Lowe sent two English doctors to examine Napoleon. Without even seeing the emperor (Montholon would not let them), they proposed to give Napoleon a purgative of calomel. Antommarchi cried out against the prescription; it would fatique the patient for no purpose. The discussion was then referred to Montholon, who sided with the two English doctors, and the medicine was administered.

            Calomel was the miracle drug of the time. Physicians prescribed it, as they did tartar emetic, for many kinds of illness, they could not otherwise treat, and especially as a cathartic for constipation. By itself, it was rather harmless. In combination with the bitter almonds in the orgeat Napoleon was drinking, it could be fatal. The almonds contain hydrocyanic acid, which releases poisonous mercurous cyanide from the otherwise inert mercury in the calomel. The victim loses consciousness soon after drinking the lethal mixture. The voluntary muscles become paralysed; the victim loses his sight and hearing.

            The victim’s stomach can protect itself against the calomel-orgeat poison if it promptly expels the substance  by vomitting. Constant use of tartar emetic, however, prevents this, and death result.

            The dosage of calomel given to Napoleon –ten grains –can only be called heroic, or insane. Normal practice at the time was one or two grains divided into several doses. Napoleon suffered a complete collapse. He was extremely weak and could not move from his bed. His stools had turned black, a sign that his stomach was corroded and bleeding. Two days later, at 5.49 p.m on May 5, he died.

Napoleon’s testimony

            Sten Forshufvud stood alone at the empty grave. All was silence here in the valley where the emperor’s poisoned body had lain for 19 years. The grave was an unmarked stone slab surrounded by a simple metal fence. He was the only visitor that day in June 1974.

            Forshufvud had arrived at St Helena a week before and was due to depart the next day. The voyage had not been easy to arrange, for the island is in some ways less accessible now than it was in Napoleon’s time. In 1869, with the opening of the Suez Canal, St Helena lost its function as a stopping place on the sea route to the Orient. The present population is heavily subsidized by the British government. It has no airport; the only way to reach the island is by an English passenger-cargo ship shuttling between Bristol and Cape Town.

            As Forshufvud stood gazing in silence at the stone slab, his thoughts turned to October 1840 when, at this place, napoleon’s body provided the last piece of evidence in his case. Earlier that year King Louis-Philippe, under pressure from the Bonapartist tide then rising in France, had decided to fulfil the dying emperor’s wish by bringing his remains back to lie in glory on the banks of the Seine. All the surviving companions of the captivity were invited to accompany their master’s body to its final resting place.

            Most had accepted and came to the grave at St Helena. Bertrand, 67, grey and weary, was there with one of his sons. Las Cases was nearly 80 and blind; his son Emmanuel went in his place. Gaurgaud, hot-tempered as ever, quarrelled with Emmanuel instead of his father. Marchand was now middle-aged and, thanks to Napoleon’s legacy, a comfortable member of the bourgeoisie. He was there with his two former assistants, Saint-Denis and Noverraz. The two doctors, O’Meara and Antommarchi, were both dead by then.

            Montholon was not there. He was in jail.

            Montholon’s life after his return from exile had been as puzzling as his earlier career. He had collected over a million francs from Napoleon’s legacy –a huge amount –but managed to lose it all by 1829. He was in and out of the army, always on the fringe, never seeming to belong anywhere. It was known that in 1827 he was received in secret by King Charles X, the former Count d’Artois. Charles never publicly rewarded Montholon, but then governments seldom reward those who do their dirty work.

            In 1840 Montholon attached himself to Louis Napoleon, the future Napoleon III.

            In August Montholon headed a hare-brained expedition from England to conquer France for his new master. French troops, evidently forewarned, were waiting on the beach at Boulogne, and the invaders were quickly captured. Montholon was sentenced to 20 years but served only 6. He would die 13 years later, without having said a word about his crime.

            It was just as well for Montholon, Forshufvud reflected, that he was not there when the companions of the exile watched workmen open the emperor’s grave, for the witnesses might have understood the meaning of the startling sight they saw. Napoleon’s body had not been embalmed, but merely buried after the autopsy within four coffins, two of them metal. When the innermost coffin was opened, the witness expected to see a skeleton.

            But Napoleon’s body was perfectly preserved; he looked as if he were asleep. His face had changed less in those 19 years than the faces of those who were gazing down into the grave. Forshufvud’s explanation for this seeming miracle –arsenic. Arsenic the destroyer also prevents tissue from decomposing; museums often use it to preserve specimens, and a human corpse will decay much more slowly if the person was exposed to chronic arsenic poisoning.

            Forshufvud’s conclusion: Napoleon’s body was mutely testifying to his own murder.

“ Everything comes to he who hustles while he waits”

                                                                                                                        -Thomas Edison