By February 1821, about four years after his arrival on St Helena, Napoleon knew his end was nigh. In fact, he played cards so much that a range of versions of solitaire (the card game also known as “patience”) have been named after him.Įventually, the living conditions-and especially his lack of exercise-began to take their toll, and Napoleon’s health began to decline precipitously. He suffered from abdominal pain, constipation, vomiting and overall weakness.

He also took up a few pastimes: he dictated his memoirs, wrote a book on Julius Caesar, studied English, and played cards. And despite Lowe’s orders that gifts were not permitted if they made mention of Napoleon’s imperial status, the former emperor continued to preserve royal protocol, with men in military dress and women in bejewelled gowns. He also designed sunken pathways in the garden to make it harder for the officers to spot him. This led to the ex-emperor going into a bizarre form of rebellion, closing the shutters of the house and carving tiny peepholes into them so that he could look out without being seen. The new British governor of the island, Hudson Lowe, was determined that Napoleon would not escape from this exile as he had done from his first one in Elba, and so restricted his movement, monitoring his correspondence, and ordering that Napoleon be seen in the flesh by British officers several times a day. A French cartoon showed the former Emperor sleeping in a tent while rats on the shore plot a rebellion-the caption read “Not even the rats want him.” A German political cartoon from the period mocked his situation, with a battalion of rats serving him instead of courtiers. The island also appears to have been infested with rats, a feature that political satirists from all over Europe took as an opportunity to poke fun at the vanquished former emperor. His servants were said to have complained of “colds, catarrhs, damp floors and poor provisions.” One of the entourage of 28 people who accompanied Napoleon was the Comte de Las Cases, who described Longwood House as “a wretched hovel, a few feet square.” After initially enjoying two pleasant months living at the home of a former friend William Balcombe, Napoleon was then moved to nearby Longwood House, a property that had fallen into disrepair, and which was particularly damp and riddled with mold. Napoleon's Final Exile Exile on Saint Helena IslandĪ tiny island measuring only about 10 by 5 miles, its jagged cliffs must have seemed a grim sight when the former emperor first laid eyes on it.

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