MARK MY WORD: HISTORY CAN BE HAIRY

Human beings love to collect things: you know, hubcaps, beer cans and, yes, even hair.

While historians love to linger over Napoleon's military prowess, it is hair that interests normal folks like Dr. Jean Fichou of Rennes, France.

Fichou has a lock of Napoleon's hair, which is easier to find than Yul Brynner's but still considered extremely rare.

In a truly noble gesture, he recently parted with a few strands so they could be tested to see if that famous-short-French guy had been poisoned. Napoleon stood 5 feet, 2 inches tall.

The remaining 220 hairs are being offered for sale by a Chicago auctioneer. The lock of hair is in a tooled leather box with a glass cover.

The official autopsy, conducted a day after Napoleon's death in 1821, concluded that the deposed emperor died of stomach cancer and not from a haircut.

But some people believe the British poisoned him after he was exiled to the remote island of St. Helena off southern Africa in 1815.

Unfortunately for the arsenic crowd, the FBI lab guys found no rat poison in Napoleon's hair or even any dandruff. The testing was paid for by the Clearwater, Fla.-based Napoleonic Society of America which sought to finally settle the cause-of-death issue.

Even if Napoleon's hair had contained arsenic, some experts argued, you couldn't conclude it was foul play. The reason: Arsenic was commonly found in licorice in Napoleon's day and Napoleon was a licorice addict.

Results of the FBI analysis were unveiled in Chicago Sunday at the 10th annual meeting of the Napoleonic Society. The for-sale box of hair was also displayed.

According to news reports, Fichou isn't the only guy with some of the famous Frenchman's hair. Thousands of samples have turned up, leaving me to wonder if perhaps all the world's toupees are really just locks of Napoleon's hair.

The next thing, you know, those ancient locks will end up on the "David Letterman Show."

Hair and the Battle of Waterloo apparently aren't the only things Napoleon lost. A professor at Columbia University's School of Medicine in New York has what he claims is the emperor's male organ, and we're not talking pipe organ here.

I'm not sure how the FBI would go about checking this claim. But with any luck, it too could wind up on the Letterman show.

All this makes me wonder if there are other body parts of Napoleon in somebody's collection, and if the funeral was a closed-casket affair.

And even if all those queries are answered, there is still one big question: Why did Napoleon keep his right hand tucked in that vest? Was it an itch or was he fearful of losing his hand to some body parts collector?

~Mark Bliss is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.