Ada: They exile him to Elba in April eighteen fourteen. He escapes in March eighteen fifteen, and reclaims Paris without firing a shot.36
Theo: The Hundred Days. And it ends at Waterloo.3
Ada: June eighteenth, eighteen fifteen. Wellington holds the ridge at Mont Saint-Jean while Blucher brings the Prussians onto the French flank. When the Imperial Guard is finally repulsed, the whole army routs.3
Theo: And people still argue about Marshal Grouchy, don't they, chasing the Prussians while the guns thundered behind him.
Ada: They do. Critics say he ignored the sound of the guns; his defenders say he followed Napoleon's explicit written orders to shadow the Prussians toward Wavre.
Theo: And that's the end of the gamble.
Ada: He surrenders aboard the British warship Bellerophon. They send him to Longwood House on windswept Saint Helena, in the South Atlantic, where he dies in May eighteen twenty-one at fifty-one, dictating memoirs to shape his own myth.38
Theo: And even the death is contested, right?
Ada: It is. The autopsies concluded advanced stomach cancer, but later tests found high arsenic in his hair, which reportedly keeps the poisoning debate alive. Accounts still differ.
Theo: So think back. The accented Corsican breaking the siege at Toulon, the trap sprung at Austerlitz, then that silent, burning Moscow.
Ada: The same audacity that gave away the heights to win also crossed the Neman convinced one more gamble would pay. Brilliance and overreach were never two different men.
Theo: And if any of this leaves you with a question, you can interrupt us any time and just ask.
Ada: The arsenic in those hair samples is a genuine loose end, and it's a whole episode of its own, one tap away.
Theo: This was Historai, where history answers back.