At the Napoleon birthday celebration at Fort Myer, Napoleon Historical Society member Vince Hawkins displayed his plaster death mask of the Emperor.  It’s been authenticated as one of only a hundred struck from the original that the attending doctor, Dr Antommarchi, created two days after Napoleon’s death in 1821.

Napoleonic death masks appear in museums from Paris to Louisiana to Havana to Mexico City to Napoleon’s own death room on St Helena.  Some are bronze, some copper, others plaster.  Some are of questionable authenticity.  Above on the left is the mask from St Helena, and on the right, the one I saw at Fort Myer.  Last March, in Napoleon’s hometown of Ajaccio, Corsica, I saw five others.

There’s controversy whether Dr Antommarchi’s mask failed and a second one molded by a British doctor, Francis Burton, became the original.  Some sources claim General Bertrand’s wife, Fanny, stole Dr Burton’s mask and gave it to Antommarchi. However, as Napoleon’s valet Marchand reports in his well-trusted memoir, “Dr Burton had procured the necessary plaster.  Dr Antommarchi, helped by him and by Archambault [a coachman] who held up the Emperor’s head, made the mask in our presence.  It turned out well.” *

Although death masks seem macabre today, it was not unusual for famous people, in particular, to have one made.  That may be the only thing Lenin, Alfred Hitchcock, James Joyce, Beethoven, and John Dillinger have in common.

(*Excerpt from In Napoleon’s Shadow, Louis-Joseph Marchand’s memoirs produced by Proctor Jones.)

In 1796, Napoleon married Josephine Beauharnais, the widow of an aristocrat who had been guillotined.  On their wedding day, Napoleon was twenty-six and Josephine thirty-two.  His future looked promising; she was bankrupt.  He married for love, she for convenience.  They had a tumultuous life together until 1809 when it became clear she could never provide him with a child.

Needing to shore up the future of his empire with a legitimate heir (preferably descended from established royalty), Napoleon reluctantly divorced Josephine and married Archduchess Marie Louise, the 18-year-old daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria. On March 20, 1811, the new empress gave birth to their son, whom Napoleon designated the King of Rome.

Napoleon loved to play with his baby boy and showed more affection for the child than the royally-raised empress was able to express. Unfortunately, when France was invaded in 1814, Marie Louise fled with the King of Rome back to her father’s court in Austria.  Napoleon, although he lived for seven more years, was never allowed to communicate with either of them again.

I was surprised to learn recently that the popular British band, The Pet Shop Boys, had dedicated a song to the King of Rome on their 2009 album—one small example of the extraordinary influence Napoleon maintains to this day.

At the far end of Longwood’s reception hall, the room in which Napoleon died, a door opens into the dining room.

Here his companions-in-exile and his occasional guests gathered in the evening to eat a brief supper—for meals with Napoleon were only twenty-minute affairs. Afterward, they dissected battles or the emperor read aloud from Corneille, Rousseau, and even the Bible.

After his mother sent two priests to St Helena, the dining room was transformed into a chapel. At first, Napoleon attended Sunday mass inside the room; later, he watched from his adjoining study.  He said it was proper for him at his death to return to the Catholic Church since he had been born within it.  Years before, when questioned on his faith, he had replied that he “took on the religion of whatever country he was in, because that was the best policy.”

Of all the rooms in Longwood House, this one is the least personal for me.  Although the walls are covered in a facsimile of the former wallpaper, and the mirror with its horizontal crack is original, the many portraits and busts of Napoleon, his family, and his followers give it the air of a museum. I know Napoleon used to sit right there with his back to the fire, but I didn’t feel his presence within these four walls on any of my visits.

Perhaps, like me, Napoleon didn’t care for this room.  By 1819, he had taken to eating in his private chambers.

In 1819, the French general and grand marshal, Henri-Gratien Bertrand, who had accompanied Napoleon into exile, designed a large birdcage for Longwood House’s gardens.  Chinese carpenters, who otherwise spent their time repairing the poorly-constructed house, built the cage and stocked it with doves and pheasants.

At first, Napoleon admired it, but he was known to free the birds, saying St Helena didn’t need any more prisoners.

Today’s cage at Longwood is an exact replica.  In 1840, nineteen years after Napoleon’s death, General Bertrand returned to St Helena as part of the honor guard accompanying the emperor’s body back to France. He also retrieved the birdcage.  That original is now in his family estate-turned-museum, the Musée-Hôtel Bertrand in Châteauroux, France.