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 further explanation 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 somewhat after 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, to rest 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—which would 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—while apparently conscious. 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—by common 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 his campaigns—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 sufficient imagination 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’s libido sexualis was 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 to call 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 the grande armée had 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?