Comment 'Key of the room in which Napoleon died and which I got there out of the door in 1822' YOU lay your hands on the object, and history goes up your arm like electricity. That’s what I’d imagine would happen to me if I was allowed to handle the key to Napoleon’s prison on St Helena. Discovered in an Edinburgh attic, passed down from a British soldier deployed in the French emperor’s incarceration, the item was sold at Sotheby’s this week for £81,900. It’s a rusted but striking object, accompanied by a verifying note from Charles Richard Fox, the soldier himself: “Key of the room in which Napoleon died and which I got there out of the door in 1822”. The bathos is obvious. The mighty, border-smashing, continent-marauding dictator, dying in a small damp property on a South Atlantic island, his privation easily securable by means of a chunk of cast metal.