The unrelenting abdominal pain was like a knife slicing through flesh and muscle and organs, again and again, day after day, week after week, without the relief of death.
Napoleon Bonaparte had risen from nowhere to become the most powerful person on earth. He had ruled an empire of his own making which, at its apogee, stretched from the Atlantic Ocean to Russia, from the icy Baltic to the sapphire-blue Ionian Sea, and comprised some seventy million souls. But, having lost the great battle of Waterloo in June 1815, he became emperor of two rooms in a rat-infested, mildewed house on a rock in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the island of St. Helena, a 70-day sail from France. Soon, his empire would shrink even further, to a wooden box six feet long, two-and-a-half feet wide, and two feet high.
British army surgeon Walter Henry said St. Helena was “the ugliest and most dismal rock conceivable of rugged and splintered surface, rising like an enormous black wart from the face of the deep.”
The island was a port of call for ships traveling to India or South Africa to take on fresh water and supplies. In 1815, it had a population of 4,000, including a garrison of 1,000 men. Napoleon’s flotilla brought an additional 2,000 soldiers to guard him. His new home, Longwood House, was a sprawling, one-story building of pale yellow stucco and twenty-three rooms. About fifty people lived there, including Napoleon’s servants and British guards.
Now, his biggest enemy wasn’t the duke of Wellington or the czar of Russia; it was the stultifying boredom. Though he had brought 1,500 books with him, he remarked that he needed 60,000 to keep him occupied. Up to six hours a day, he dictated his memoirs to a secretary.
Every evening at eight, a servant in an embroidered green coat and black silk knee breeches announced, “His Majesty’s dinner is served.” Napoleon, his aides, and their wives sat down to a formal dinner on silver platters and Sèvres china. Periodically, a giant rat skittered across the room as the diners politely ignored it. After dinner, everyone played cards. Then they listened as Napoleon relived his greatest battles or read out loud. If he managed to stay up until eleven, he would say, “Another victory over time.”
Perhaps his wisest step in staying healthy, however, was keeping far away from doctors.
Throughout his life, Napoleon had enjoyed excellent health. He exercised regularly, drank alcohol in moderation, and scrubbed himself in a hot bath every morning. Perhaps his wisest step in staying healthy, however, was keeping far away from doctors. Whenever he met a physician, his first question was invariably, “Monsieur, how many patients have you killed in your practice?” He rarely, if ever, took medication or submitted to bleeding, purging, and puking.
His first year on St. Helena, Napoleon was allowed to ride around the island and walk into the port of Jamestown, conversing freely with those he met. However, a new British Governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, arrived in October 1816, fretting day and night about the dishonor he would suffer if the most important prisoner in the history of the world escaped on his watch. He placed more and more insulting restrictions on Napoleon. Refusing to be guarded by babysitters in red coats, Napoleon stopped riding and walking all together. With the sudden cessation of exercise, he rapidly gained weight and began to suffer swollen feet, headaches, bleeding gums, and a cough.
On September 20, 1817, for the first time he complained of a dull pain in the area of the torso roughly parallel to his right elbow. From that day forward — other than a period of remission from October 1819 to June 1820 — he was never completely free from the symptoms, which included nausea, vomiting, sleeplessness, constipation, and depression.
In July 1820, he grew fatigued from the slightest exertion. His pulse was irregular, his hands and feet freezing cold. By the spring of 1821, he could no longer walk without assistance and could barely eat, merely sucking the juice out of meat. The pain in his right side had spread over his entire abdomen.
Indeed, many powerful people wanted Napoleon dead.
The emperor lost at least twenty pounds in a few months. When his Italian doctor, François Carlo Antommarchi, urged him to take medications, Napoleon snorted, “Keep your medicines, I don’t want to have two diseases, the one I have already and the one you’ll give me.”
On April 2, he told his English physician, Archibald Arnott, “I have here a sharp pain that, when I feel it, is like being cut with a razor; do you think the pylorus [the bottom of the stomach connected to the duodenum] is affected? My father died of that. Is it not hereditary?” In 1785, the physician who performed Carlo Buonaparte’s autopsy had found in the stomach a “tumor of semi-cartilaginous consistency, which was of the shape and size of a large potato or a large elongated pear."
Dr. Arnott reassured him that it was merely gas, and if he took his medication it would go away. The emperor refused.
On April 15, 1821, he wrote in his will, “I die prematurely, assassinated by the English oligarchy and its hired killer: the English nation will not be slow in avenging me.”
After two more weeks of agony, he added, “After my death, which cannot be far off, I want you to open my body...I recommend that you examine my stomach very carefully, make a precise, detailed report on it...I bequeath to all the ruling families the horror and shame of my last moments.”
Indeed, many powerful people wanted Napoleon dead. King Louis XVIII of France — the old, cowardly, unpopular brother of Louis XVI — sat uneasily on a sagging throne. Many Frenchmen longed for Napoleon to come back with the energizing spirit of the Revolution.
Britain, which had taken custody of Napoleon, feared he would escape the island, round up another army and attack England, despite the fortune they spent annually on keeping him in exile. And the ruler of Germany, Austria, Spain, Italy, and Russia would have loved to see him safely buried — if, that is, his death seemed natural. News of his murder would surely cause revolutions to spring up in Napoleon’s name.
By the end of April, he was delirious and vomiting material that looked like coffee grounds—a sign of what we now know to be gastro-intestinal bleeding. Periodically, he fell into comas.
On April 26, he saw his beloved first wife Josephine, who had died of pneumonia seven years earlier. “She told me that we were about to see each other again,” he said, “never more to part; she assured me that — did you see her?”
On the night of May 4, he mumbled about France, the army, and Josephine. The following day he fell into a coma and died at the age of 51.
Louis Marchand, the emperor’s faithful valet who had been by his side every day on St. Helena, washed the body with eau de cologne and, with two assistant valets, laid it out on a trestle table in the billiard room where the emperor had studied maps.
This was, perhaps, the most important autopsy ever performed. At three p.m., Napoleon’s physician Dr. Antommarchi, in the presence of seven other surgeons, all British, and ten French followers of Napoleon, sliced open the body.
So how did so much arsenic get into the emperor’s hair throughout his life?
The postmortem report stated, “An ulcer which penetrated the coats of the stomach was discovered one inch from the pylorus sufficient to allow the passage of the little finger. The internal surface of the stomach to nearly its whole extent was a mass of cancerous disease, or hard tumorous portions advancing to cancer, this was particularly noticed near the pylorus…The stomach was found nearly filled with a large quantity of fluid, resembling coffee grounds…”
Months earlier, Napoleon’s stomach ulcer had burst open, causing a hole through which a man could fit his finger. But his liver had glued itself to his stomach, acting as a kind of cork and preventing the stomach acids and food from flooding his body and killing him within hours, as a ruptured gastric ulcer normally would. Though his rupture had sealed, the ulcer developed into cancer. Modern research has shown that untreated gastric ulcers become malignant in about six to nine percent of cases.
Napoleon was buried in his favorite spot on St. Helena, a tranquil grove, but in 1840, he was exhumed in preparation for his return to France. Oddly, though his uniform had decayed, the emperor’s body was perfectly preserved, and he looked as if he was sleeping, which many believed was a sign of arsenic poisoning.
In the 1960s, a Swedish dentist and Napoleon buff, Dr. Sten Forshufvud, studied Napoleon’s illness and recognized twenty-two out of thirty symptoms of arsenic poisoning. Though the French were reluctant to lift the thirty-five tons of highly polished porphyry covering their emperor in Les Invalides in Paris and submit the body to testing, Dr. Forshufvud found numerous locks of Napoleon’s hair from his time on St. Helena. Over the years, Napoleon’s staff, residents, and visitors to St. Helena had begged for them as keepsakes. When he died, his valet, Marchand, had shaved his head and made many more gifts of Napoleon’s hair.
Dr. Forshufvud obtained strands of hair from a variety of provenanced sources and submitted them for testing, which revealed arsenic content up to one hundred times the normal amount—proof of poisoning, he believed. But since Dr. Forshufvud’s research, Napoleon’s hair from his pre-St. Helena days has been tested by research institutes around the world, going back to his earliest years in Corsica. Always, he had arsenic levels about one hundred times normal. So did his first wife, Josephine, and his son, Napoleon II.
People of Napoleon’s time ingested arsenic in several ways that had nothing to with poison. Many medications contained arsenic, but Napoleon kept as far from doctors as possible and, as far as we know, never took any medicine until his final weeks. Arsenic was a popular ingredient in cosmetics, which may account for Josephine’s high levels, but Napoleon would never have worn cosmetics.
Napoleon’s green wallpaper on St. Helena contained arsenic, sending bits of the stuff into the air with every breeze, but his levels did not increase on the island.
So how did so much arsenic get into the emperor’s hair throughout his life?
I believe the arsenic came from Napoleon’s hygiene regimen. Unlike most men of his time, especially soldiers, Napoleon bathed every day, carting around a bathtub on campaign. He was an absolute stickler for cleanliness. Since lice were a perennial problem of an army on the march, he may have used an arsenic-based hair tonic to prevent infestations; tiny bits of the toxin are fatal to insects. Over time, regular use of such a hair tonic may have killed someone else, but Napoleon’s genetics and lifestyle were such that he had excellent health until he developed stomach cancer.
Thank you for listening. I hope you have enjoyed the discussion from The Royal Art of Poison, which is available at booksellers everywhere.
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