Napoleon I
THERE is not, and may possibly never be, an adequate biography of this prodigious man. It is a truism to say that he has cast a doubt on all past glory; let us hope that he has rendered future glory impossible, for to judge by the late war it seems impossible that any rival to the glory of Napoleon can ever arise. In the matter of slaying his fellow-creatures he appears to have reached the summit of human achievement; possibly also in all matters of organization and administration. Material things hardly seemed to affect him; bestriding the world like a colossus he has given us a sublime instance of Intellect that for many years ruthlessly overmastered Circumstance. That Intellect was finally itself mastered by disease, leaving behind it a record which is of supreme interest to mankind; a record which, alas, is so disfigured by prejudice and falsehood that it is difficult to distinguish between what is true and what is untrue. Napoleon himself possessed so extraordinary a personality that nearly every one whom he met became a fervent adorer. With regard to him we can find no half-tones, no detached reporters; therefore itis enormously difficult to find even the basis for a biography. Fortunately, that is not now our province. It is merely necessary that we shall attempt to make a consistent story of the reports of illness which perplex us in regard to his life and death; it adds interest to the quest when we are told that sometimes disease lent its aid to Fate in swaying the destinies of battles. And yet, even after Napoleon has lived, there are some historians who deny the influence of a “great man” upon history, and would attribute to “tendencies” and “ideas” events which ordinary people would attribute to individual genius. Some persons think that Napoleon was merely an episode—that he had no real influence upon history; it is the custom to point to his career as an exemplification of the thesis that war has played very little real part in the moulding of the course of the world. Into all this we need not now enter, beyond saying that he was the “child of the French Revolution” who killed his own spiritual father; the reaction from Napoleon was Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Holy Alliance; the reaction from these forces of repression was the late war. So it is difficult to agree that Napoleon was only an “episode.” We have merely to remark that he was the most interesting of all men, and, so far as we can tell,will probably remain so. As Fielding long ago pointed out inJonathan Wild, a man’s “greatness” appears to depend on his homicidal capacity. To make yourself a hero all you have to do is to slaughter as many of your fellow-creatures as God will permit. How poor the figures of Woodrow Wilson or Judge Hughes seem beside the grey-coated “little corporal”! Though it is quite probable that either of these most estimable American peacemakers have done more good for the human race than was achieved by any warrior! So sinful is man that we throw our hats in the air and whoop for Napoleon the slaughterer, rather than for Woodrow Wilson, who was “too proud to fight.”
When Napoleon was sent to St. Helena he was followed by a very few faithful friends, who seem to have spent their time in hating one another rather than in comforting their fallen idol. It is difficult to get at the truth of these last few years because, though most of the eye-witnesses have published their memoirs, each man seems to have been more concerned to assure the world of the greatness of his own sacrifice than to record the exact facts. Therefore, though Napoleon urged them to keep diaries, and thereby make great sums of money through their imprisonment, yet these diaries generally seem to haveaimed rather at attacking the other faithful ones than at telling us exactly what happened.
The post-mortem examination of Napoleon’s body was performed by Francesco Antommarchi, a young Corsican physician, anatomist, and pathologist, who was sent to St. Helena about eighteen months before Napoleon’s death in the hope that he, being a Corsican, would be able to win the Emperor’s confidence and cure the illness of which he was already complaining. Unfortunately, Antommarchi was a very young man, and Napoleon suspected both his medical skill and the reason of his presence. Napoleon used to suffer from severe pains in his stomach; he would clasp himself, and groan, “O, mon pylore!” By that time he was suffering from cancer of the stomach, and Antommarchi did not suspect it. When Napoleon groaned and writhed in agony it is said that Antommarchi merely laughed, and prescribed him tartar emetic in lemonade. Napoleon was violently sick, and thought himself poisoned; he swore he would never again taste any of Antommarchi’s medicine. Once again Antommarchi attempted to give him tartar emetic in lemonade; it was not in vain that Napoleon had won a reputation for being a great strategist, for, when Antommarchi’s back was turned he handed the draught to the unsuspectingMontholon. In ten minutes that hero reacted in the usual manner, and extremely violently. Napoleon was horrified and outraged in his feelings; quite naturally he accused Antommarchi of trying to poison him, called him “assassin,” and refused to see him again. Another fault that Napoleon found with the unhappy young man was that whenever he wanted medical attendance Antommarchi was not to be found, but had to be ferreted out from Jamestown, three and a half miles away; so altogether Antommarchi’s attendance could not be called a success. Napoleon in his wrath was “terrible as an army with banners.” Even at St. Helena, where the resources of the whole world had been expended in the effort to cage him helpless, it must have been no joke to stand up before those awful eyes, that scorching tongue; and it is no wonder that Antommarchi preferred to spend the last few weeks idling about Jamestown rather than forcing unwelcome attention upon his terrible patient.
Worst of all, Antommarchi at first persuaded himself that Napoleon’s last illness was not serious. When Napoleon cried in his agony, “O, mon pylore!” and complained of a pain that shot through him like a knife, Antommarchi merely laughed and turned to his antimony withcatastrophic results. It shakes our faith in Antommarchi’s professional skill to read that until the very last moment he would not believe that there was much the matter. The veriest blockhead—one would imagine—must have seen that the Emperor was seriously ill. Many a case of cancer of the stomach has been mistaken for simple dyspepsia in its early stages, but there comes a time when the true nature of the disease forces itself upon even the most casual observer. The rapid wasting, the cachexia, the vomiting, the pain, all impress themselves upon both patient and friends, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Antommarchi must have been both careless and negligent. When the inevitable happened, and Napoleon died, it was Antommarchi who performed the autopsy, and found a condition which it is charitable to suppose may have masked the last symptoms and may have explained, if it did not excuse, the young anatomist’s mistaken confidence.
We conclude our brief sketch of the unhappy Antommarchi by saying that when he returned to Europe he published the least accurate and most disingenuous of all accounts of Napoleon’s last days. His object seems to have been rather to conceal his own shortcomings than to tell the truth. This book sets the seal on his character,and casts doubt on all else that comes from his pen. He may have been, as theLancetsays, a “trained and competent pathologist”; he was certainly a most unfortunate young man.
The post-mortem was performed in the presence of several British military surgeons, who appear to have been true sons of John Bull, with all the prejudice, ignorance, and cocksureness that in the eyes of other nations distinguish us so splendidly. Though truthfulness was not a strong point with Antommarchi, he seems to have known his pathology, and has left us an exceedingly good and well-written report of what he found. Strange to relate, the body was found to be still covered thickly with a superficial layer of fat, and the heart and omenta were also adipose. This would seem impossible in the body of a man who had just died from cancer of the stomach, but is corroborated by a report from a Dr. Henry, who was also present, and is not unknown. I remember the case of an old woman who, though hardly at all wasted, was found at the autopsy to have an extensive cancerous growth of the pylorus; the explanation was that the disease had been so acute that it slew her before there had been time to produce much wasting. At one point Napoleon’s cancerous ulcer had perforated the stomach, and the orificehad been sealed by adhesions. Dr. Henry proudly states that he himself was able to thrust his finger through it. The liver was large but not diseased; the spleen was large and “full of blood”—probably Antommarchi meant engorged. The intestine was covered by small bright-red patches, evidently showing inflammation of lymphatic tissue such as frequently occurs in general infections of the body. The bladder contained gravel and several definite calculi. There was hardly any secondary cancerous development, except for a few enlarged glands. Antommarchi and the French generally had diagnosed before death that he was suffering from some sort of hepatitis endemic to St. Helena, and the cancer was a great surprise to them—not that it would have mattered much from the point of view of treatment.
Napoleon’s hands and feet were extremely small; his skin was white and delicate; his body had feminine characteristics, such as wide hips and narrow shoulders; his reproductive organs were small and apparently atrophied. He is said to have been impotent for some time before he died. There was little hair on the body, and the hair of the head was fine, silky, and sparse. Twenty years later his body was exhumed and taken to France, and Dr. Guillard, who waspermitted to make a brief examination, stated that the beard and nails appeared to have grown since death; there was very little sign of decomposition; men who had known him in life recognized his face immediately it was uncovered.
Leonard Guthrie points out that some of these signs seem to indicate a condition of hypo-pituitarism—the opposite to the condition of hyper-pituitarism which causes “giantism.” Far-fetched as this theory may appear, yet it is possible that there may be something in it.
The autopsy showed beyond cavil that the cause of death was cancer of the stomach, and it is difficult to see what more Antommarchi could have done in the way of treatment than he did, although certainly an irritant poison like tartar emetic would not have been good for a man with cancer of the stomach, even if it did not actually shorten his life. But Napoleon was not a good patient. He had seen too much of army surgery to have a great respect for our profession; indeed, it is probable that he had no respect for anybody but the Emperor Napoleon. He, at least, knew his business. He could manœuvre a great army in the field and win battles—and lose them too. But even a lost Napoleonic battle—there were not many—was better managed than a victory of any other man;whereas when you were dealing with these doctor fellows you could never tell whether their results were caused by their treatment or by the intervention of whatever gods there be. Decidedly Antommarchi was the last man in the world to be sent to treat the fallen, but still imperious, warrior.
The symptoms of impending death seem to have been masked by a continued fever, and probably Antommarchi was not really much to blame. This idea is to some extent borne out by a couple of specimens in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, which are said to have belonged to the body of Napoleon. The story is that they were surreptitiously removed by Antommarchi, and handed by him to Barry O’Meara, who in his turn gave them to Sir Astley Cooper. That baronet handed them to the museum, where they are now preserved as of doubtful origin. But their genuineness depends upon whether we can believe that Antommarchi would or could have removed them, and whether O’Meara was telling the truth to Sir Astley Cooper. It is doubtful which of the two first-mentioned men is the less credible, and Cooper could not have known how untruthful O’Meara was to show himself, or he would probably not have thought for one moment that thespecimens were genuine. O’Meara was a contentious Irishman who, like most other people, had fallen under the sway of Napoleon’s personal charm. He published a book in which he libelled Sir Hudson Lowe, whose hard fate it was to be Napoleon’s jailer at St. Helena—that isle of unrest. For some reason Lowe never took action against his traducer until it was too late, so that his own character, like most things connected with Napoleon, still remains a bone of contention. But O’Meara had definitely put himself on the side of the French against the English, and it was the object of the French to show that their demigod had died of some illness endemic to that devil’s island, aggravated by the barbarous ill-treatment of the brutal British. We on our side contended that St. Helena was a sort of earthly paradise, where one should live for ever. The fragments are fromsomebody’sileum, and show little raised patches of inflamed lymphoid tissue; Sir William Leishman considers the post-mortem findings, apart from the cancer, those of some long-continued fever, such as Mediterranean fever.
Mediterranean or Malta fever is a curious specific fever due to theMicrococcus melitensis, which shows itself by recurrent bouts of pyrexia, accompanied by constipation, chronic anæmia,and wasting. Between the bouts the patient may appear perfectly well. There are three types—the “undulatory” here described; the “intermittent,” in which the attacks come on almost daily; and the “malignant,” in which the patient only lives for a week or ten days. It is now known to be contracted by drinking the infected milk of goats, and it is almost confined to the shores of the Mediterranean and certain parts of India. It may last for years, and it is quite possible that Napoleon caught it at Elba, of which Mediterranean island he was the unwilling emperor in 1814. Thence he returned to France, as it was said, because he had not elba-room on his little kingdom. It is certain that for years he had been subject to feverish attacks, which army surgeons would now possibly classify as “P.U.O.,” and it is quite possible that these may in reality have been manifestations of Malta fever.
It has been surmised by some enthusiasts that the frequency of micturition, followed by dysuria, to which he was liable, may have really been due to hyper-pituitarism. Whenever we do not understand a thing let us blame a ductless gland; the pituitary body is well hidden beneath the brain, and its action is still not thoroughly understood. But surely we need no furtherexplanation of this miserable symptom than the stones in the bladder. Napoleon for many years might almost be said to have lived on horseback, and riding is the very thing to cause untold misery to a man afflicted with vesical calculus. Dysuria, attendant upon frequency of micturition, is a most suggestive symptom; nowadays we are always taught to consider the possibility of stone, and it is rather surprising that nobody seems to have suspected it during his lifetime. This could be very well accounted for by remembering the general ignorance and incompetence of army surgeons at the time, the mighty position of the patient, and his intolerance of the medical profession. Few men would have dared to suggest that it would be well for him to submit to the passage of a sound, even if the trouble ever became sufficiently urgent to compel him to confide so private a matter to one so lowly as a mere army doctor. Yet he had known and admired Baron Larrey, the great military surgeon of the Napoleonic Wars; one can only surmise that his calculi did not give him much trouble, or that they grew more rapidly in the sedentary life which he had led at St. Helena.
During the last year or so he took great interest in gardening, and spent hours in planting trees, digging the soil, and generally behaving somewhatafter the manner of a suburban householder. He was intensely bored by his forced inaction, and used to take refuge in chess. His staff at first welcomed this, but unhappily they could find nobody bad enough for the mighty strategist to beat; yet nobody dared to give him checkmate, and it was necessary to lose the game foolishly rather than to defeat Napoleon. It is clear that the qualities requisite in a good chess-player are by no means the same as those necessary to outmanœuvre an army.
Throughout his life his pulse-rate seldom exceeded fifty per minute; as he grew older he was subject to increasing lassitude; his extremities felt constantly chilly, and he used to lie for hours daily in hot-water baths. Possibly these may have been symptoms of hypo-pituitarism; Lord Rosebery follows popular opinion in attributing his laziness to the weakening effects of hot baths. Occasionally Napoleon suffered from attacks of vomiting, followed by fits of extreme lethargy. It is quite possible that these vomiting attacks may have been due to the gastric ulcer, which must have been growing for years until, about September, 1820, it became acutely malignant.
The legend that Napoleon suffered from epilepsy appears, according to Dr. Ireland, torest upon a statement in Talleyrand’s memoirs. In September, 1805, in Talleyrand’s presence, Napoleon was seized after dinner with a sort of fit, and fell to the ground struggling convulsively. Talleyrand loosened his cravat, obeying the popular rule in such circumstances to “give him air.” Remusat, the chief chamberlain, gave him water, which he drank. Talleyrand returned to the charge, and “inundated” him with eau-de-Cologne. The Emperor awakened, and said something—one would like to know what he said when he felt the inundation streaming down his clothes—probably something truly of the camp. Half an hour later he was on the road that was to lead him—to Austerlitz, of all places! Clearly this fit, whatever it may have been, was not epilepsy in the ordinary sense of the term. There was no “cry,” no biting of the tongue, no foaming at the mouth, and apparently no unconsciousness. Moreover, epilepsy is accompanied by degeneration of the intellect, and nobody dares to say that Austerlitz, Jena, and Wagram—to say nothing of Aspern and Eckmuhl—were won by a degenerate. Eylau and Friedland were also to come after 1805, and these seven names still ring like a trumpet for sheer glory, daring, and supreme genius. I suppose there is not one of them—except perhaps Aspern—whichwould not have made an imperishable name for any lesser general. It is impossible to believe that they were fought by an epileptic. If Napoleon really had epilepsy it was assuredly not the “grand mal” which helps to fill our asylums. It is just possible that “petit mal” may have been in the picture. This is a curious condition which manifests itself by momentary loss of consciousness; the patient may become suddenly dreamy and purposeless, and may perform curious involuntary actions—even crimes—whileapparentlyconscious. When he recovers he knows nothing about what he has been doing, and may even resume the interrupted action which had occupied him at the moment of the seizure. Some such explanation may account for Napoleon’s fits of furious passion, that seem to have been followed by periods of lethargy and vomiting. It is a sort of pleasing paradox—and mankind dearly loves paradox—to say that supremely great men suffer from epilepsy. It was said of Julius Cæsar, of St. Paul, and of Mohammed. These men are said to have suffered from “falling sickness,” whatever that may have been; there are plenty of conditions which may make men fall to the ground, without being epileptic: Ménière’s disease, for instance. It is ridiculous to suppose that Julius Cæsar and Napoleon—bycommon consent the two greatest of the sons of men—should have been subject to a disease which deteriorates the intellect.
It is possible that some such trouble as “petit mal” may have been at the bottom of the curious stories of a certain listless torpor that appears to have overcome Napoleon at critical moments in his later battles. Something of the kind happened at Borodino in 1812, the bloodiest and most frightful battle in history till that time. Napoleon indeed won, in the sense that the exhausted Russians retreated to Moscow, whither he pursued them to his ill-fortune; but the battle was not fought with anything like the supreme genius which he displayed in his other campaigns. Similarly, he is said to have been thus stricken helpless after Ligny, when he defeated Blucher in 1815. He wasted precious hours in lethargy, which should have been spent in his usual furious pursuit of his beaten foe. To this day the French hold that, but for Napoleon’s inexplicable idleness after Ligny, there would have been no St. Helena; and, with all the respect due to Wellington and his thin red line, it is by no means certain that the French are wrong. But nations will continue to squabble about Waterloo till there shall be no more war; and 1814 had been the most brilliant of hiscampaigns—probably of any man’s campaigns.
“Of woman came the beginning of sin, and through her therefore we all die,” said the ungallant author of Ecclesiasticus; and it is certain that Napoleon was extremely susceptible to feminine charms. Like a Roman emperor, he had but to cast a glance at a woman and she was at his feet. Yet probably his life was not very much less moral than was customary among the great at that time. When we remember his extraordinary personal charm, it is rather a matter for wonder that women seem to have had so little serious effect upon his life, and he seems to have taken comparatively little advantage of his opportunities. His first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, was a flighty Creole who pleased herself entirely; in the vulgar phrase, she “took her pleasure where she found it.” To this Napoleon appears to have been complaisant, but as she could not produce an heir to the dynasty which he wished to found, he divorced her, and married the Austrian princess Marie Louise, whose father he had defeated and humiliated as few sovereigns have ever been humiliated. She deserted him without a qualm when he was sent to Elba; when he was finally imprisoned at St. Helena there was no question of her following him, even if the British Government had had sufficientimagination to permit such a thing. Napoleon, who was fond of her, wanted her to go with him; but one could not expect a Government containing Castlereagh, Liverpool, and Bathurst, to show any sympathy to the fallen foe who had been a nightmare to Europe for twenty years. She would never consent to see Josephine. It is said that Napoleon’slibido sexualiswas violent, but rapidly quelled. In conversation at St. Helena he admitted having possessed seven mistresses; of them he said simply, “C’est beaucoup.” When he was sent to St. Helena his mother wrote and asked to be allowed to follow him; however great a man’s fall, his mother never deserts him, and asylum doctors find that long after the wife or sisters forget some demented and bestial creature, his mother loyally continues her visits till the grave closes over one or the other. But more remarkable is the fact that Pauline Bonaparte, who was always looked upon as a shameless hussy, would have followed him to St. Helena, only that she was ill in bed at the time. She was the beautiful sister who sat to Canova for the statue of Venus in the Villa Borghese. It was then thought most shocking for a lady of high degree to be sculptured as a nude Venus—perhaps it is now; I say,perhaps. There are few ladies of high degree so beautiful as Princess Pauline,as Canova shows her. A friend said to her about the statue, “Were you not uncomfortable, princess, sitting there without any clothes on?” “Uncomfortable,” said Princess Pauline, “why should I be uncomfortable? There was a stove in the room!” There are many other still less creditable stories told about her. It was poor beautiful Pauline who lost her husband of yellow fever, herself recovering of an attack at the same time. She cut off her hair and buried it in his coffin. This was thought a wonderful instance of wifely devotion, until the cynical Emperor remarked: “Quite so; quite so; of course, she knows it will grow again better than ever for cutting it off, and that it would have fallen off anyhow after the fever.” Yet when he was sent to Elba, this frivolous sister followed him, and she sold every jewel she possessed to make life comfortable for him at St. Helena. She was a very human and beautiful woman, this Pauline; she detested Marie Louise, and once in 1810 at a grand fête she saucily poked out her tongue at the young Empress in full view of all the nobles. Unhappily Napoleon saw her, and cast upon her a dreadful look; Pauline picked up her skirts and ran headlong from the room. When she heard of his death she wept bitterly; she died four years afterwards of cancer. Her last action was tocall for a mirror, looking into which she died, saying, “I am still beautiful; I am not afraid to die.”
In attempting to judge Marie Louise it must be remembered that there is a horrid story told of Napoleon’s first meeting with her in France after the civil marriage had been performed by proxy in Vienna. It is said that the fury of his lust did her physical injury, and that that is the true reason why she never forgave him and deserted him at the first opportunity. She bore him a son, of whom he was passionately fond, but after his downfall the son—the poor little King of Rome immortalized by Rostand in “l’Aiglon”—fell into the hands of Metternich, the Austrian, who is said to have deliberately contrived to have him taught improper practices, lest he should grow up to be as terrible a menace to the world as his father. But all these are rumours, and show how difficult it is to ascertain the truth of anything connected with Napoleon.
When Napoleon fell to the dust after Leipzig, Marie Louise became too friendly with Count von Neipperg, whom she morganatically married after Napoleon’s death. Although he heard of her infidelity, he forgave her, and mentioned her affectionately in his will, thereby showing, to borrow a famous phrase of Gibbon about Belisarius,“Either less or more than the character of a man.”
For nine days before he died he lay unconscious and babbled in delirium. On the morning of May 5, 1821, Montholon thought he heard the words “France ... armée ... tête d’armée.” The dying Emperor thrust Montholon from his side, struggled out of bed, and staggered towards the window. Montholon overpowered him and put him back to bed, where he lay silent and motionless till he died the same evening. The man who had fought about sixty pitched battles, all of which he had won, I believe, but two—who had caused the deaths of three millions of his own men and untold millions of his enemies—died as peacefully in his bed as any humble labourer. What dim memories passed through his clouded brain as he tried to say “head of the army”? A great tropical storm was threatening Longwood. Did he recall the famous “sun of Austerlitz” beneath whose rays thegrande arméehad elevated its idolized head to the highest pitch of earthly glory? Who can follow the queer paths taken by associated ideas in the human brain?