Dr David Chandler, a British Napoleon expert, is the latest convert to the theory, endorsed by the British coordinator of the International Napoleonic Society back in 1997, that Napoleon died at the hands of a rascally nobleman, Count Charles de Montholon, who while masquerading as his friend fed him repeated doses of arsenic.
Others believe the killer was the former emperor's wallpaper. In a paper published in 1982, British scientists blamed emissions of arsine gas from the walls of his bedroom, caused by fungus interacting with arsenic chlorate used in its colouring. The FBI, called in to investigate by the Napoleonic Society of America, accepted the presence of arsenic but made no ruling on culpability.
Some medical experts mock such revisionism. Dr Milo Keynes of Cambridge, for instance, has argued in the Journal of Medical Biography that Napoleon's death resulted from an incident in 1803 when he fell from his carriage and lost consciousness because of an underfunction of his pituitary endocrine gland.
The doctor contests with equal force the popular theory that Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had piles. The true cause, he hazards, was that he suffered from hypopituitarism, resulting in obesity, gross somnolence, feminisation, reduced libido and impotence.
All this is compelling, but hardly conclusive enough to exonerate the count, or even the wallpaper. "My wallpaper and I," said the dying Oscar Wilde in his tawdry Paris hotel room, "are fighting a duel to the death." Perhaps Napoleon was unknowingly doing the same. And that still leaves Mozart and Tchaikovsky. Has anyone tested their wallpaper?
