Napoleon Dies on St. Helena

May 5, 1821

At fifty-one, in a damp farmhouse called Longwood, the former emperor died - of stomach cancer, his doctors said, of arsenic, said later toxicologists. His last word was 'Josephine.' His bones would return to Paris in 1840 to lie under the dome of Les Invalides, where they remain. The legend, carefully cultivated through his memoirs dictated in exile, proved more durable than the empire itself.