around his neck, containing a suicide pill - a tiny pouch of black taffeta
containing a mixture of belladonna, white hellebore and opium. When
Caulaincourt brought the draft treaty of Fontainebleau for him to sign on
rz April, he remarked cryptically: 'I shall not need anything; a soldier
does not need much space to die in.' After dining with Caulaincourt,
when he again behaved as on the sledge to Warsaw in r8rz, talking about
himself and his reign as if of a third person, he complained of the base
ingratitude of all who had known him and said that life had become
intolerable.
At 3 in the morning of the 13th, Caulaincourt was summoned to the
Emperor's bedside. Napoleon told him he had taken poison and made a
fond and tearful farewell. Caulaincourt implies that he was alone with his
master, but Constant claimed he and a valet named Petard were also in
attendance; this seems more plausible, as someone must have woken
Caulaincourt from his sleep. Then Napoleon began vomiting and
suffered convulsions. Grand Marshal Bertrand and the military physician
Dr Yvan were summoned and told to administer another dose and finish
him off; allegedly Yvan refused, saying that he had taken the Hippocratic
oath and was no murderer. After suffering great pain fo r four hours,
Napoleon found the pangs easing at 7 a.m., to the point where he was
able to show himself in public next day. As to why the poison had failed
to take effect, two theories were offered. One was that Yvan, following
orders after Maloyaroslavets, had mixed a double dose of poison that
turned out so powerful that the Emperor's system could not absorb it and
so it was vomited up. The other was that the poison had lost its potency
over nearly two years.
There is something very unsatisfactory about the traditional accounts
of this entire incident. We may reject at the outset the story that Dr Yvan
prepared a double dose of poison, for this is internally inconsistent with
other parts of the tale. Yvan could scarcely claim he had taken the
Hippocratic oath and was no murderer if he had already prepared a
deadly concoction. As to the suicide pill 'losing its potency', one can only
conclude that whoever devised it must have been supremely incompetent,
as there were extant at the time many deadly poisons, arsenic most
notably, from, which death would have been instantaneous. Moreover,
most people, having taken a near-lethal dose of poison, are not up and
about next day.
What, then, is the explanation? The key seems to be the failure of the
first attempt, on 7 April, which Caulaincourt mentions without giving
details - he was not at Fontainebleau on this date. Had Yvan given the
Emperor a placebo in r8rz to reassure him? Did a puzzled Emperor,
marcin
(Marcin)
#1