After Waterloo, Napoleon gave himself up to the British, expecting to end his days leading the life of a country gentleman. Instead he was exiled to the remote island of St. Helena where he was to spend the last six years of his life in a house called Longwood. Jean-Paul Kauffmann, who was himself imprisoned as a hostage in Beirut for three years, visits Longwood and sits for days in the French Emperor s simple room in an attempt to understand those years of exile. The past seeps into the present and the house slowly comes alive with the great man s presence. Napoleon was accompanied to St. Helena by a faithful few whose eye-witness accounts reveal how he coped with his captivity and how it finally crushed him. The Dark Room at Longwood is Kauffmann s journey back into the past and a finely written, highly evocative exploration of Napoleon s final years.