Napoleon the Great
Page 97
It was typically hyperbolic, unusually blasphemous and factually incorrect on many levels, but living on St Helena having once ruled most of Europe was a harsh punishment indeed (though far better than the execution that the Bourbons and Prussians had wanted for him). When there was a slight earthquake that summer, he told an aide ‘that we ought to have been swallowed up, island and all. It would be so pleasant to die in company.’136 He clutched at any future political developments that might result in his release, citing ‘an insurrection in France’, Lord Holland becoming prime minister, the death of Louis XVIII, and the Prince Regent’s only child, Princess Charlotte, becoming queen of England, saying: ‘She will bring me back to Europe.’ In reality, none of these provided the least likelihood of salvation for him, especially after November 1817, when Charlotte died and was replaced as the Prince Regent’s heir by his unsympathetic younger brother, the future King William IV.137
In 1818 the Balcombes left the island, O’Meara was sent away and Cipriani, a Corsican with whom Napoleon used to reminisce, died. Before she left, Betsy noticed a severe deterioration in Napoleon’s health after a bout of illness. ‘The havoc and change it had made in his appearance was sad to look upon,’ she wrote.
His face was literally the colour of yellow wax, and his cheeks had fallen in pouches on either side of his face. His ankles were so swollen that the flesh literally hung over the sides of his shoes; he was so weak, that without resting one hand on the table near him, and the other on the shoulder of an attendant, he could not have stood.138
When they said goodbye for the last time, Napoleon said: ‘Soon you will be sailing away towards England leaving me to die on this miserable rock. Look at those dreadful mountains – they are my prison walls.’ Ever conscious of the power of gifts, he gave Betsy the handkerchief of his she was crying into, and when she asked for a lock of his hair he had Marchand cut off four, for her and other family members.139
The diseases that historians have ascribed to Napoleon over the years include gonorrhoea, gallstones, epilepsy, migraine, peptic ulcer, malaria, brucellosis, amoebic hepatitis, dysentery, scurvy, gout, an over-active pituitary gland, bilharzia, gas, indigestion, renal problems, hypogonadism, heart failure, cystitis, manic depression and various syndromes such as Klinefelter’s, Fröhlich’s and Zollinger-Ellison.140 Almost all of these can be safely dismissed, apart from haemorrhoids, a mild case of childhood tuberculosis that had completely cleared up, bladder infection with stones, scabies, and headaches, all of which he suffered from before his time on St Helena. An extraordinarily detailed book, Itinéraire de Napoléon au jour le jour, first published in 1947, records where he was and what he was doing every single day of his adult life, and from which it is clear that he took remarkably few days off work from illness. Indeed he boasted as late as January 1815: ‘I was never ill in my life.’141 He caught influenza on campaign, and might indeed have been under par at Wagram, Borodino, the third day of Leipzig and possibly at Waterloo, but not to the extent that it is possible to discern any effect on his decision-making in any of those battles.
All that changed in 1818 when he began to suffer from chronic leg-swellings, more headaches, considerable nausea, low appetite, ‘profuse perspiration’, palpitations, pains in his right side, bad constipation and (unsurprisingly) very low spirits.142 It was in early to mid-1818 that the stomach cancer that was to kill him fully took hold, although it wasn’t to be properly diagnosed for over two years. In early 1818 he didn’t step outside the house at all for a month. ‘From the first,’ noted Walter Henry, assistant surgeon of the 66th Foot, on the staff of the Deadwood Barracks, ‘Napoleon appeared to be aware of the nature of his malady, referring [to it as a] disease of the stomach, of which his father died at the age of thirty-five, and with which the Princess [Pauline] Borghese was threatened.’143 Both Pauline and Caroline Bonaparte were to die of cancer at forty-four and fifty-seven respectively, and Napoleon’s natural son Charles Léon also died of stomach cancer, albeit at the age of eighty-one.144 (Had Napoleon lived to that age, Britain would have released him when his nephew was elected president in 1848.)
In 1809 Napoleon had told Corvisart that he wanted a lesson in anatomy, so human body parts were brought to Malmaison for dissection in his study before lunch. Josephine noticed that he ‘was paler than usual and could not eat’, and persuaded Corvisart not to continue after lunch, for which Napoleon subsequently thanked her.145 This was curiously squeamish considering the number of eviscerated bodies that he had seen on battlefields, but his brief lesson helped him understand the workings of the body and ensured that now in 1818 he knew enough to recognize that his illness was life-threatening.
Various imaginative conspiracy theories have been put forward over the years alleging that Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic by Montholon and/or others, based on the supposedly high arsenic content in his hair. Yet hair samples from plenty of other contemporaries have yielded similarly high arsenic levels – such as from Josephine and the King of Rome – and his hair had high arsenic counts at several stages of his life before he went to St Helena. The 10.38 parts per million of arsenic in his hair was lower, for example, than the 17 parts per million in George III’s hair.146 It is true that Napoleon might have benefited from a better doctor than the barely competent Francesco Antommarchi, appointed by Madame Mère and Cardinal Fesch, who took over in September 1819 – Napoleon refused to see any doctor appointed by Lowe – but nothing could alter the ultimate outcome once stomach cancer had taken hold.147 Seven British surgeons and Antommarchi opened his corpse at the post-mortem in the billiards room the day after Napoleon’s death, the body resting on some planks of wood supported by trestles. In the words of the official post-mortem report:
The internal surface of the stomach to nearly its whole length, was a mass of cancerous disease or scirrhous portions advancing to cancer, this was particularly noticed near the pylorus. The cardiac extremity for a small space near the termination of the oesophagus was the only part appearing in a healthy state, the stomach was found nearly filled with a large body of fluid resembling coffee grounds. The convex surface of the left lobe of the liver adhered to the diaphragm.148
The symptoms and time-course make it likely that this was not a benign stomach ulcer that became malignant, which used to happen in the days before acid-arresting medication, but a cancer from the beginning which spread until it had taken over almost the entire stomach. The autopsy showed that the cancer had spread to the lymph nodes and the tissues in contact with the stomach, but not to the liver. Adhesions in the chest cavity suggest a previous infection – early tuberculosis or bacterial pneumonia some time before – which was not related to his death. Blood-stained fluid in the pleural cavities and the pericardial cavity could have been the consequence of septic shock, which could follow a perforation of the stomach. The coffee grounds were blood that had been turned dark brown by the action of stomach acid and digestive enzymes.149
Cancer was diagnosed by all the doctors except Antommarchi, who was under pressure from Bertrand and Montholon to say he had suffered from gastro-hepatitis, so that ‘the English oligarchy’ could be blamed for choosing unhealthy Longwood for Napoleon’s imprisonment.150 The words ‘and the liver was perhaps a little larger than usual’, on the third page of the post-mortem report, were struck out by Lowe and didn’t appear in the published version, as they implied that Napoleon suffered from hepatitis as well as from the cancer that killed him.151 This has fixated conspiracy theorists, but was essentially irrelevant, for, as one of the doctors present, Walter Henry, wrote of the stomach:
This organ was found most extensively disorganized: in fact it was ulcerated all over like a honeycomb. The focus of the disease was exactly the spot pointed out by Napoleon [on several occasions in his final illness] – the pylorus, or lower end where the intestines begin. At this place I put my finger into a hole made by the ulcer that had eaten through the stomach, but which was stopped by a light adhesion to the adjacent liver.152
He added: ‘How Napoleon could have existed for any time with such an organ was wonderful, for there was not an inch of it sound.’153
Napoleon’s fiftieth birthday was a sad affair, prompting nostalgic reminiscence. ‘My heart is turned to bronze,’ he said. ‘I was never in love, except perhaps with Josephine a little. And I was twenty-seven years old when I first knew her. I had a sincere affection for Marie Louise.’154 A see-saw was erected in the billiards room in January 1821 to give the Emperor some exercise, but it saw little use.155 In February he threw some of Antommarchi’s medicine out of a window, and vomited almost daily.156 Later that month he was afflicted with ‘a dry cough, vomiting, an almost unbearable burning in the intestines, general agitation, anxiety and a burning thirst’.157 The scenes from Napoleon’s final deterioration were wrenching for those around him. His complexion was likened to tallow and comparisons were made to a ghost.
On March 17, 1821 Napoleon saw the Abbé Buonavita, who had been sent by Cardinal Fesch, and gave him instructions about what should be said to Madame Mère and the family. The abbé was ‘dismayed at the havoc wrought by the disease on his features and was at the same time profoundly moved by his calmness and resignation’. Napoleon tried to get into his carriage with Montholon but couldn’t and ‘returned shaking with a shivering chill’. Gnats swarmed around Longwood which mosquito nets failed to keep off.158 ‘Do you not think that death would be a Heaven-sent relief to me?’ he asked Antommarchi in late March. ‘I do not fear it, but while I shall do nothing to hasten it I shall not grasp at a straw to live.’159
Lowe obstinately refused to believe that Napoleon was anything more than a hypochondriac. He was persuaded of this by a British doctor, Thomas Arnott, who told him Antommarchi was lying about the fevers, and as late as April 6 said ‘General Bonaparte is not affected by any serious complaint, probably more mental than any other.’160 Arnott did admit that the heavily bearded Napoleon looked ‘horrible’. (He was shaved two days later.) Others reported to Lowe that the colour of Napoleon’s face was ‘very pallid, cadaverous’ and that his bedroom was filthy, ‘but particularly the bedclothes, occasioned by General Bonaparte spitting upon them. He has got a cough and spits a good deal and never turns his head to avoid the bed linen but throws it out immediately before him.’161 He lost between twenty-two and thirty-three pounds during the last six months of his life, although he still had over an inch of fat around his heart when he died. His sunken cheeks are nonetheless evident from the death-mask that Antommarchi made of him.
Napoleon wrote his will on April 15, 1821. ‘I die in the Apostolic and Roman faith,’ it began, ‘in whose bosom I was born more than fifty years ago. I wish my ashes to rest by the banks of the Seine in the midst of the French nation I have loved so dearly.’162 He divided his fortune and possessions, including many millions of francs that he didn’t actually possess, between his family, servants and former generals. One bequest was for 100,000 francs to go to Cantillon, Wellington’s would-be assassin, who Napoleon said ‘had as much right to kill that oligarch as the latter had to send me to die on the rock of St Helena’.163 Equally unworthy was the accusation against Lowe: ‘I die before my time, murdered by the English oligarchy and its hired assassin.’164 He stated that the 1814 and 1815 invasions of France were ‘due to the treason of Marmont, Augereau, Talleyrand and Lafayette’, adding, though with how much sincerity may be questioned, ‘I forgive them. May the posterity of France forgive them as I have done.’
The will gave away a number of belongings that weren’t his either, such as ‘Frederick II’s alarm clock, which I removed from Potsdam’, and listed the contents of his linen cupboard, including ‘1 pair of braces; 4 pairs of white cashmere underpants and undershirts; 6 scarves; 6 flannel vests; 4 pairs of drawers … 1 little box full of my snuff … 1 pair of slippers, 6 girdles’, and so on.165 His ‘golden toilet case for teeth, left at the dentist’s’ was to go to the King of Rome. Not relinquishing his penchant for organizing other people’s marital lives, he gave orders for Bessières’ son to marry Duroc’s daughter, and for Marchand to marry the widow, sister or daughter of an officer or soldier of the Old Guard. He was unrepentant over the Duc d’Enghien, saying that ‘it was necessary to the security, interest and honour of the French nation … In like circumstances I would do as much again.’166 He bequeathed a pair of golden shoe buckles to Joseph, ‘a little pair of golden garter buckles’ to Lucien, and a golden collar clasp to Jérôme.167 Bracelets of his hair were sent to Marie Louise, Madame Mère, each of his siblings, nephews and nieces, ‘and a more substantial one for my son.’ The servants did far better than Napoleon’s family out of his will, excepting the King of Rome, although he did say: ‘I have always been well-pleased with my most dear spouse Marie Louise; to the last I retain most tender feelings for her.’ He might not have done so had he known of her liaison with Neipperg, by whom she had two children during his lifetime, and whom she married after his death.*
‘I thank my good and most excellent mother,’ he wrote, ‘the cardinal [Fesch], my brothers Joseph, Lucien, Jérôme, Pauline, Caroline, Julie [Joseph’s wife], Hortense, Catarina [Jérôme’s wife] and Eugène for their enduring concern.’168 Caroline’s inclusion in the list was particularly magnanimous considering her betrayal of him. Elisa had died in Italy the previous August. Although he wasn’t in the list, Louis was also forgiven for ‘the libel he published in 1820, full of false assertions and forged evidence’. (He had published a compendium of historical documents relating to his reign in Holland, which drew attention to the way he had stood up to Napoleon in defence of the Dutch.)
By April 26 Napoleon was vomiting blood and the next day a dark, coffee-coloured fluid. He asked for his draped campaign bed to be moved into the drawing room where there was better airflow, and Bertrand noted that he hardly had the strength to spit, so his vest was stained by a reddish spittle.169 Marchand recalled that he nonetheless showed ‘dignity, calm and goodness’, even while complaining that the pain in his right side ‘cuts me like a razor blade’.170
Eight codicils to Napoleon’s will were drawn up before April 29, some antedated to the 27th, and on the 29th and 30th he started repeating the same sentences continuously. Although his last words before he lost the power of speech were scarcely audible ramblings – either ‘France … Army … head of the Army’ or ‘France … the head of the Army … Josephine’ – more interesting were his last lucid words.171 In a copy of the book on Caesar that he had dictated to Marchand, his valet-cum-executor noted that between eight and nine o’clock on the evening of May 2 Napoleon dictated the words: ‘I bequeath to my son my estate in Ajaccio; two houses in the environs of Salines and their gardens; all my property in the area of Ajaccio which are capable of raising 50,000 francs a year in rent.’172 Marchard noted this down in pencil in the preface of the book and then carefully sewed it into the lining of a small red-leather box embossed with the Emperor’s coat of arms, given by his descendants to the Napoleonic scholar Henry Lachouque, whose family still possess it. So, having been master of Europe and living the most adventurous life of modern times, Napoleon reverted on his deathbed to what he had been when he was trying to negotiate over the mulberry trees thirty years earlier: a Corsican landowner of the petit noblesse keen to maintain his family’s property rights.
On May 3 Napoleon received extreme unction in private from the Abbé Ange-Paul Vignali. An only nominal Catholic in life who had made war on one pope and imprisoned another, he was received back into the bosom of the Church in death. Shortly before he died, he asked Bertrand to close his eyes afterwards, ‘Because they naturally stay open’, something he must have noticed, and been haunted by, from his experience of sixty battlefields.173 During the 4th, Napoleon suffered from prolonged hiccups, and in the evening he slipped into delirium, asking the name of his son. The next day, Saturday, May 5, 1821, after a very blustery and stormy morning, the fifty-one-year-old former Emperor gave three sighs at long intervals and died at 5.49 p.m., just after t
he firing of the island’s sunset gun.174 What Chateaubriand called ‘the mightiest breath of life that ever animated human clay’ had ceased.
Napoleon was buried with full military honours in Torbett’s Spring, a beautiful spot a mile from Longwood punctuated by willow trees where he had sometimes visited. He was dressed in his uniform of a colonel in the Chasseurs à Cheval. The coffin was borne along a goat-path to the grave by British grenadiers of the 66th and 20th Regiments, prompting one spectator to note ‘the irony that the regimental colours under which the Emperor was being buried had the golden letters of “Talavera”, “Albuera”, “Vitoria” and “The Pyrenees” woven on them in strange mockery’.175 Three salvoes of fifteen guns and three volleys of musketry were fired, creating ‘a succession of fine echoes from the hills and ravines’.176 Yet the tomb was unmarked, because even after the former Emperor’s death, Lowe would not allow his gravestone to feature the imperial title ‘Napoleon’, while Bertrand and Montholon would not accept Lowe’s wording of the non-royal ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’, so it was left blank.177 (It can be seen today in the courtyard of Longwood, still without wording.) His remains were removed from the grave and taken to Paris in 1840 by Bertrand and Gourgaud and given a magnificent funeral on December 2, the anniversary of his coronation and the battle of Austerlitz. Though the day was freezing, an estimated one million Frenchmen lined the route of the cortège through Paris. Attending his interment at Les Invalides were four of his marshals: Soult, Moncey, Oudinot and Grouchy. Others who were still living but who had turned against him – Bernadotte, Marmont and Victor – did not attend.
After Napoleon’s death, Louis Marchand drew up a list of the 370 books in the library at Longwood, which testifies to the Emperor’s eclectic literary taste and interests. They included Northanger Abbey, Paradise Lost, Dr Johnson’s Dictionary and Tour of the Highlands, various Army Lists, Robinson Crusoe, a history of Egypt, a biography of George III, Voltaire’s Charles XII (which he had read in Moscow, complete with its strictures on the Russian weather), Monarchy by Chateaubriand, no fewer than twenty books on religion, the comic novel Castle Rackrent, several of Byron’s works, some Shakespeare, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a book on ‘coquetry’, Debrett’s Peerage, eight volumes of the Spectator, Edmund Burke’s violently anti-Jacobin Reflections on the Revolution in France, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (whose precepts he would have saved himself a great deal of trouble by following) and a biography of Admiral Nelson.178