It now seems likely that none of these illnesses caused his death, and there is no evidence that anybody did, or tried to, kill him. In 1982, however, more than 160 years after Napoleon’s death, a respected British chemist unearthed evidence that the great man was indeed poisoned – but by a thing, not a person. And that thing may well have been the wallpaper in his house on St. Helena, where the British had exiled Napoleon in 1815.