So why, last summer, did a French lawyer, Bruno Roy-Henri, apply to the French defence ministry for the corpse to be dug up again and DNA-tested? And why did the ministry refuse? The answer to both questions may be the same. Roy-Henri is one of a growing number of critics who have been arguing for 30 years that the bones in Les Invalides are those of an impostor.
His argument, set out in his book Napoléon, L'Enigme de l'Exhumé de 1840, relies on discrepancies in the accounts of the burial in 1821, and the exhumation in 1840. In 1821 the ribbon of Napoleon's Légion d'Honneur was arranged on top of his uniform coat. A cockaded hat rested on his feet. He wore silk stockings and riding boots with silver spurs, and the silver urns containing his heart and stomach were placed in the corners of the coffin. His face and head were smoothly shaven and his mouth was closed, but the unembalmed body was so badly putrefied that his face was unrecognisable.
In 1840 the Légion d'Honneur was under his clothing, and the coat itself was a different one. The hat had lost its cockade and moved to his thighs; the stockings and spurs had vanished, the stitching of the boots had been undone to expose his toes, and the urns had moved up between his legs. The corpse was now bearded and had hair on its head. Its mouth was open and the face was young-looking, without disfigurement. The body had been embalmed.
Roy-Henri's suspicions fall upon the ancient enemy. The perfidious English, he suggests, stole away the emperor's remains and hid them in Westminster Abbey. In his place they left the corpse of his major-domo, Franceschi Cipriani, a fellow Corsican of strikingly similar appearance (but larger feet - hence the unstitching of the boots). To the real revisionists, however, none of this is worth a row of haricots verts. So what if the English robbed the grave? The joke is on them. The body they stole was no more Napoleon's than the one they left in its place. True, a middle-aged man of small stature and hooked pharaonic nose dies and is buried on St Helena in May 1821, just as the history books record.But he is not Napoleon Bonaparte. There is nothing new in the idea that Napoleon employed doubles. Dame Mabel Brookes, a historian whose family lived on St Helena at the time of Napoleon's exile and knew him well, was certain of it. In her influential book St Helena Story, published in 1960 and heavily reliant on family memoirs, she insists that there were four of them. 'One might imagine,' says Dr Alexander Gorbovsky, 'that the emperor fearlessly galloping in front of his troops under enemy fire was not always the man he seemed.' By Brookes's account, impersonating a military genius was no soft option. One of the doubles was killed by a bullet. Another was poisoned before Waterloo. Another was thrown from his horse and crippled. And the fourth... Well, we shall see what happened to the fourth.
Alexander Gorbovsky is a 72-year-old Russian historian, now based in London, who worked for 20 years in the USSR's Academy of Sciences. While in England he has been sifting through the Napoleonic literature - a literature so vast that no historian on earth can possibly have read all of it. Worldwide, the number of books on Napoleon exceeds 200,000. As so many have done before him, Gorbovsky immediately caught the whiff of foul air that surrounds the emperor's death. On May 3, 1821, a courtier writes: 'At 11.30 the emperor had a bowel movement. It was black, enormous, larger alone than all those he had for a month.' But the servants do not understand the significance of what they have seen. They heave up Napoleon's dead weight and change the sheets.
What fascinates Gorbovsky is the story of Fran�ois Eug�ne Robeaud, a rabbit breeder of Baleycourt in the Meuse, who is the only one of Napoleon's doppelgangers whose name survives. In the village register, his death is recorded thus: 'Born in this village, died on St Helena...' The date has been obliterated.
After Napoleon's defeat, says Gorbovsky, Robeaud's career as imperial body-double was terminated. He returned to Baleycourt, where he lived with his unmarried sister. The seasons passed and he slipped back into the easy rhythms of rural life, a forgotten soldier of the revolution. Forgotten, that is, until the summer of 1818, when there arrives in Baleycourt a carriage of such opulence that nobody will forget it. The passengers remain hidden behind curtains, and it is left to the coachman to ask the way. He is looking, he says, for the house of Francois Eugene Robeaud. Even today, such a visitation to a small rural community would not pass without notice. In 1818 it is sensational. Pressed by his neighbours, Robeaud claims his mysterious visitor was a travelling doctor who wanted to buy rabbits for a friend. And there it might have rested, had it not been for what happens next.
Robeaud and his sister disappear. They go at night, without telling anyone and without saying goodbye - behaviour that causes frank astonishment. A year later, police find Robeaud's sister living comfortably in Nantes. Why they went to such trouble over a humble farmer and his sister is in itself a cause of wonder. The woman's story is that she is being maintained, for reasons of altruism, by the very same doctor who came to buy rabbits. She offers no explanation for their flight, and can say of Francois only that he is 'a sailor at sea, on a long voyage'.
Late in the same year, a tall blonde woman begins a letter to a friend in France. 'Success is ours!' she writes. 'Napoleon has left the island.' The writer is Fanny Dillon Bertrand, part-Irish wife of Count Henri-Gratien Bertrand, a senior member of Napoleon's household in exile.
Rumours fly. A fast American ship has been seen hanging about on the horizon. Napoleon himself has become increasingly reclusive, refusing to show himself to English officers. Visitors who do see him report puzzling changes in his behaviour. The Russian representative on St Helena, Count Balmain, is surprised by a sudden interest in farming. 'Now Napoleon has a fantasy to become a shepherd. He buys all the pretty lambs of the island and amuses himself feeding them under his windows.'
More shockingly, he records a visit to Napoleon by a relative of the English prime minister Lord Liverpool: 'Bonaparte received him in a room which was completely dark. After a quarter of an hour's conversation he ordered candles to be brought in and said, 'I want to see you'. He was abed in a flannel dressing-gown and had a red turban on his head. His face was unshaven for several days.' To the courtly Balmain, this was a gross and inexplicable breach of etiquette: 'At least he could put on his trousers.'
Gorbovsky is not the only one to have weighed the evidence - Napoleon's reclusiveness, his change of behaviour, the hovering American ship, Fanny Bertrand's letter - and concluded that the emperor had flown the coop and been replaced by a rustic from the Meuse. Napoleon's family at the time are in no doubt. His mother, Laetitia, known as 'Madame Mere', and his uncle Cardinal Joseph Fesch are unconcerned by reports of the prisoner's declining health, for they are sure he is not their boy. In a letter, Fesch insists: 'Although we know neither the place where he presently resides nor the time when he will reveal himself, we have valid proofs of our assertion.' The valid proofs, however, may not be of the kind that would satisfy a jury. According to Napoleon's sister Pauline, Madame Mere and the cardinal were in thrall to a German clairvoyant who received the news directly from the Virgin Mary: 'His Majesty has been taken away by angels and transported to another country where his health is very good.'
