him, and indeed it was well known that Fanny Bertrand had long been
wanting to take her children back to France. Napoleon, whose dislike of
the Bertrands increased during the last year of his life, amended his will
so as to give Montholon two million francs, over and above what he had
already given to Albine; Bertrand's legacy was reduced to soo,ooo francs,
only slightly more than Marchand, with 40o,ooo, who, as a valet should
have received only about a third the amount given to the Grand Marshal.
Certainly the financial factor was never far from Montholon's mind.
The fu rtive way in which the last sacrament was administered to
Napoleon by Father Vignali shows the hand of Montholon once more.
Montholon fe ared that because the Emperor's will said he died as a
Catholic, if he did not receive Extreme Unction, the will might be
declared invalid and thus the financial provisions benefiting him would be
set aside. But for him to have been able to administer arsenic
surreptitiously over five years, he had to be far more than a mere fortune
hunter. On the basis of cui bono, the only hypothesis that makes sense is
that Montholon was a Bourbon agent who had been trained in those black
arts of slow poisoning that were a special feature of this era, and are
preserved for posterity in the pages of Balzac and Alexandre Dumas.
Despite Montholon's close ties with Hudson Lowe, it is a moral
certainty that he was not working for the British on this diabolical
scheme. Q!.Iite apart from the peculiar horror evinced for poisoners in the
English culture - a statute from the reign of Henry VIII ordained a
penalty of death by immersion in boiling water -it made no sense for
Britain to murder Napoleon. If he died in suspicious circumstances,
Britain would be the world's pariah, which was why Lowe was so
adamant that the only possible cause of death allowed to be declared by
the doctors under his jurisdiction was cancer. Besides, the British
Foreign Office, famous for taking the long view, would have preferred to
keep the ex-Emperor on St Helena indefinitely. By so doing they could,
at the limit, bring recalcitrant European powers to heel by threatening to
release the ogre.
That leaves the Bourbons as the most likely assassins. The most likely
transmission belt fo r orders from the comte d' Artois, Montholon's
presumed paymaster, was the French Commissioner Montchenu, who
may not have been the bumbling idiot he pretended to be. The Bourbons'
motive, as Napoleon knew well enough, was vengeance, not just fo r the
general humiliation of their family but particularly for the murder of
the due d'Enghien. It would not be beyond the bounds of the plausible if
the loathsome Talleyrand was also involved. Having established the
correlation between Montholon's presence at Longwood on each occasion
marcin
(Marcin)
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