Emperor released, the damage was done. Not surpisingly, Gourgaud was
not mentioned in Napoleon's will.
Having seen the back of both Las Cases and Gourgaud, Montholon
fe lt confident that there was now no impediment to his dominance at
Longwood. Unexpectedly Napoleon turned to the butler Cipriani as his
confidant. Suddenly Cipriani too was gone, dying in agony on 26
February r8r8 fr om a mysterious and undiagnosed complaint. A few days
later, again for reasons unexplained, his body was exhumed and never
found again. This is an incident historians have never cleared up
satisfactorily, and is especially murky when one considers that Cipriani
had served with Hudson Lowe on Capri in r8o6, but was at the time one
of Saliceti's double agents. The more one penetrates the arcana of the
world of Longwood, the more it appears like one of the darker chapters in
Balzac or Alexandre Dumas.
However, Montholon could never have things entirely his own way at
Longwood. The next complication came from Dr O'Meara. Finding a
swelling on the Emperor's right side in the region of the liver, O'Meara
diagnosed hepatitis and treated him with mercury. But Napoleon,
possibly primed by Montholon, suddenly broke off the treatment and
accused O'Meara of making reports to Hudson Lowe. This was true
enough, but there was increasing concern in the Governor's mansion at
Plantation House that O'Meara's intelligence did not square with that
being passed (for money) by Montholon to the French Commissioner,
Montchenu. Lowe, however, got O'Meara to return to Longwood and
give his word of honour that he would make no more reports, while
secretly insisting that he do just that. Napoleon, who seems to have been
fond of O'Meara, took him back.
However, Lowe soon determined to be rid of O'Meara, for two
reasons. It came to his attention that O'Meara was corresponding directly
to the Admiralty, bypassing him; and in Europe the returning Gourgaud
alleged that O'Meara was the secret channel by which the Emperor
communicated with his supporters in Europe. Once again Lowe and
Bathurst proved to be men of like mind. Lowe wrote to request
O'Meara's dismissal, but Bathurst had always decided independently that
he should be removed. O'Meara departed St Helena on 25 July r8r8, still
on cordial terms with Napoleon. Once in England he made public his
opinion that the Emperor's health was suffering because of the unhealthy
climate on St Helena, and was court-martialled and dismissed from the
Navy for his pains. It is difficult to feel much sympathy for O'Meara,
who seems to have been a likeable rogue. Without telling Napoleon, he
passed on the gossip of Longwood to the Admiralty, who in turn
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