How They Croaked

Emperor of France

Born: Corsica, France, August 15, 1769

Died: the island of St. Helena, May 5, 1821 51 years old

NAPOLEON GOT TO be the emperor of France because he wanted to. Nobody else was running France after the French Revolution, so it was his for the taking. It didn’t matter that his diplomatic skills were weak; nothing says “I’m in charge” better than setting off a cannonball in your yard.

There are plenty of famous paintings of Napoleon seizing other countries and appearing manly with his hand tucked in his shirt. Turns out, he was just protecting his weakest spot—his stomach. What killed him was growing right under his hand.

Napoleon got into military school at nine years old because his dad knew somebody who knew somebody. Pretty soon, Napoleon had cast-iron resolve about what he’d be when he grew up. And even though he grew up shorter than most and always had something to prove, he was a man on a mission. His map reading and attack-from-behind strategies made him the best player of Capture the Flag in the whole world. He took over Italy, Austria, Prussia (Germany), and a mess of other places. Napoleon became famous for pillaging, looting, and killing five million friends and foes—and not caring one little bit.

Napoleon was married twice, but he was always off at one battlefield or another. And even when he was home, his heart wasn’t in it. His first wife, Josephine, didn’t miss him that much, and his second wife, Marie-Louise, who was Marie Antoinette’s grandniece, was too busy raising l’enfant Napoleon II to care.

Great Britain, Austria, Russia, and Prussia had had enough of Napoleon. They took over Paris and forced Napoleon to give up. He was exiled to the island of Elba. He hated islands: there wasn’t much to conquer, and once he did he’d be out of work. Napoleon escaped from the island tout de suite. He returned to France and got back in power.

One hundred days later, British and Prussian armies defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, and he was captured again. Exile location number two was another island—St. Helena, a seventy-day sail to a dot in the middle of the southern Atlantic Ocean. But Napoleon wasn’t alone. There were five warships and three thousand annoyed English officers stuck there to guard him, many of whom slept with a pencil and paper under their pillow so they could take notes and later write about Napoleon in their memoirs.

After sitting around the island for five years, killing nobody, Napoleon’s body grew a deep layer of fat. His body became “feminized.” He got soft and curvy. Luckily, artists weren’t doing his portrait anymore, because it would have looked like a painting of a pear-shaped old lady. He lost all his hair (except that on his head). The sun gave him a headache, and he needed help standing. Plus, there was a piercing pain in his stomach that never quit.

He had hiccups that went on for days and days. Not the cute kind, but the kind that people try to scare out of a person. It’s a good guess Napoleon was hard to scare.

To make him better, doctors used chemical warfare on the lining of Napoleon’s stomach. This triggered vomiting on a massive scale. They also mixed together a manly dose of a highly explosive ingredient known to detonate an intestinal bomb with 100 percent accuracy. The resulting poop gave new meaning to the phrase “surprise attack from behind.” Unfortunately for everyone, Napoleon did you-know-what right in the bed, every couple of hours, for the next few days. It was said to be “impressive.”

While the doctors took a break, Napoleon’s valet de chambre worked nonstop changing the sheets—and sneaking moments to write about the experience.

Napoleon got worse. Then the doctors actually blistered his thighs and stomach, trying to release what was killing him. This was followed by a soothing smear of wax, resin, and mutton suet. Flies were attracted to all the interesting things going on around Napoleon, and swatting flies off Napoleon was one more task for the busy valet until the patient was put under a net.

On his last day, Napoleon was laughing crazily and throwing up black stuff. So the doctors blistered his feet, his chest, and one calf. His eyes opened and then rolled back in his head. C’est fini. Napoleon was dead. He died on May 5, 1821. He was fifty-one years old.

Word hit the street quickly on the island: “We’re going home!” And three thousand soldiers started packing.

The next morning, a famous sketch was drawn of Napoleon’s dead body. Napoleon’s valet did a drawing, too, but he put himself in the foreground faking grief. That was right before he took some Napoleonic goodies he felt he deserved: a glass and a pen.

The doctors did an autopsy. The chest was opened. Quelle surprise! There was a heart. It was cut out and put into a jar. Then they found what had killed him: a cancerous stomach ulcer. It was in the spot where Napoleon had his hand in so many paintings. Finally, the dead body was sewn back together. Napoleon’s valet took the bloody autopsy sheet and cut it up for souvenirs. The valet also cut off all Napoleon’s hair to put in frames and lockets.

After a big ceremony and a gun salute, Napoleon was put in the ground under some trees. Their branches were stripped for souvenirs. The three thousand officers were in the streets, not paying their respects but getting in line to catch the first boat out of there. The valet went home with three lead-sealed trunks.

Nineteen years after Napoleon died, the British allowed Napoleon’s remains to be returned to France. First they took a quick peek inside Napoleon’s coffin to make sure he was still dead. Then they took his corpse back to Paris, where he now lies in Napoleon’s Tomb, an ornate place for a hero—except he wasn’t one.

Napoleon had wanted his heart sent to his wife. But as in life, she never received it.

BARON DOMINIQUE-JEAN LARREY, A PRIVATE surgeon to Napoleon, created the first ambulance for the wounded men on the battlefield in 1792. Even with battlefield ambulances, 500,000 of his own men (one-sixth of the French population) were killed in the Napoleonic Wars.

The first motorized ambulance was invented in 1895 and used by the French Army Corps in 1900.

A “NAPOLEON COMPLEX” DESCRIBES PEOPLE who think they have a shortcoming and try to cover it up by overdoing other things in their lives. They say Napoleon’s crazy desire to take over the world was to compensate for being short. Napoleon was average in height for the times (five feet five); he just seemed short because he hung around his Imperial Guards, who were extra tall.

ACCORDING TO HISTORIAN PAUL JOHNSON, there are more books written about Napoleon than about any other person except Jesus Christ. For example, twelve people in Napoleon’s inner circle on St. Helena wrote books about him: three doctors, three valets, three army men, one female friend, one local official, and one teenage girl.