shook his head. Then Napoleon exclaimed angrily: 'I would live to be
eighty if I had not been brought to this damned island.'
On 21 January 1819 Stokoe came to Longwood to tell the Emperor he
could not continue as his physician. Political imperatives meant that his
honest diagnosis of hepatitis would have to be 'doctored' in another
sense, and Stokoe felt unable to continue in these circumstances. His real
fear was that he would be punished for a political gaffe , as there were just
nine months to go before he retired on a pension. His fears were justified.
The details of the hepatitis diagnosis leaked out, and Stokoe was court
martialled. In a particularly vindictive show of teeth by the British elite,
Stokoe was dismissed the service and lost the full pension he had striven
so hard to achieve. For Lowe, who now habitually got round problems of
nomenclature by referring to 'the person now residing at Longwood',
Stokoe's greatest crime was that he had referred to Napoleon as 'the
Emperor' or, in the pompous officialese of the court-martial, 'knowingly
and wilfully designating General Bonaparte in the said bulletin in a
manner different from that in which he is designated in the Act of
Parliament for the better custody of his person'.
The year 1819 initially saw Napoleon in good health, and much
exercised with the departures and arrivals on the island. In September
that year the supplementary staff sent by Madame Mere arrived. Two
servants were a welcome addition, for one of them, Coursot, had worked
for Duroc and Madame Mere, and Chandellier had trained as a cook in
the Tuileries before entering Pauline Borghese's service. The two
Corsican priests sent out by the increasingly devout Letizia seemed to
have been handpicked as an odd couple: one was very old and almost
incapable of speech as the result of a stroke; the other was very young but
barely literate.
Opinions are violently divided on the doctor chosen by Fesch. Thirty
year-old Francesco Antommarchi was headstrong and boorish and never
popular with Napoleon, who described him as an ignorant and unreliable
bungler. Antommarchi fell foul of Napoleon even before the first
interview on 21 September 1819 by going to see Lowe before travelling
up to Longwood. An irate Emperor kept him waiting and then made him
promise never to divulge any confidential medical details to the British.
Next there was a period of entente until Napoleon again lost patience
with him. Antommarchi then went to Lowe and requested repatriation,
which the Governor granted. At one time, during the brief period of
favour, Napoleon promised Antommarchi 2oo,ooo francs in his will but
then cancelled the bequest. Since there is something histrionic and even
absurd about some of Antommarchi's coxcomb antics, there has been a
marcin
(Marcin)
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