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 59th 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
