Someone told me the other day that Napoleon died a Catholic...
Running a Google search --
It seems there is a story that he began attending daily Mass while exiled on St. Helena but that no one knows if this story is apocryphal, wishful-thinking, or actually true.
My priest talked about people who repent at the very end of their lives and said that often they don't have the time to really grasp their sins and to bring themselves to true repentance. Any deathbed conversion of Napoleon would seem to me to be doubtful, because he was raised Catholic and overtly rejected the tenets of the faith in countless ways, imprisoned Pius VII, tried to appropriate the papal states, besides leading nations into pointless wars for the sake of his own ego and whatever Freemasonic scheme he was enacting. These actions would make it hard for him to achieve true repentance, to put it mildly. Attending Mass at the end of his life may have just been, for him, another egomaniacal, ceremonial act.
It reminds me of a hit man I once saw on some TV show who was raised Catholic, fell away, killed people for a living, then when he got old, confessed and was forgiven. Yet his confession felt hollow, you didn't sense any real remorse. He came off as hardened and void of soul. The interviewer asked him, "Do you really think God will forgive you," and he said blankly and affectlessly ( I'm paraphrasing ), "That's the Catholic religion, you confess, you get forgiven." No, it doesn't work like that. You have to genuinely deplore your sins. If you wallow in them all your life, knowing full well it's wrong, when you finally do come back to the Church, God may remove the grace you need to repent.
But if Napoleon DID get the grace to repent, then the little man could very well be in heaven. Strange thought!