Visitors to the Army Museum in Paris are being treated to the rare sight of two taxidermists at work restoring a stuffed horse -- the last one ridden by Napoleon Bonaparte. "Le Vizir" is a little worse for wear more than 200 years after carrying the emperor to victory against the Prussians and the Russians -- not to mention being stuffed not just once, but twice.
The white Arabian stallion, a gift to Napoleon from an Ottoman sultan in 1802, sports a brand on his rump made up of an N topped with a crown. One of the emperor's favourites -- recalling great victories at Jena and Eylau -- he accompanied his master to exile in Elba after Napoleon's first forced abdication in 1814. By the time Napoleon swept back to power -- for 100 days -- in France the following year after escaping from Elba, Le Vizir was old enough to retire. So, while Le Vizir also returned to France he was spared the ignominy that awaited Napoleon at Waterloo. Instead he spent his twilight years in the care of Leon de Chanlaire, an officer of the imperial stables, while Napoleon was banished to the British crown colony of Saint Helena in the southern Atlantic.
Chanlaire had Le Vizir stuffed shortly after the horse died at the ripe old age of 33 in 1826. But fearing that reprisals against those suspected of ties to Napoleon would extend to the emperor's horse, Chanlaire sold Le Vizir on to William Clark, an Englishman living in northern France. But Clark too feared association with the defunct empire, and he arranged for Le Vizir to be smuggled to England in 1839. Once safely across the Channel, Le Vizir could be restuffed, and he went on display at the Manchester Natural History Society in 1843.
Le Vizir was finally repatriated in 1868, after the Manchester society had a few financial difficulties and had to give up the horse. Le Vizir finally took up his place at the Army Museum -- just a short trot away from his master's imposing tomb under the dome of Les Invalides, in 1905.
