Francois de Cande Montholon, descendant of Count Charles de Montholon, spilled the beans some time back, underpinning that it was a tale of loneliness, love and wife swapping that led to the emperor’s death.

There are different versions as to how Napoleon had got slow poisoned with arsenic that led to his death. But according to this version, Emperor’s companion in exile De Montholon had willingly shared his wife Albine de Vassal with Napoleon and bore no grievance against him.

De Montholon had a reputation of being a great lover. He was convinced that the obese and ‘half impotent’ emperor was no sexual threat to him. It was only after returning from St Helena in 1821 (the year Napoleon died at the age of 52) that he discovered that Albine had truly fallen in love with Napoleon. The couple then separated.

In St Helena, Albine, a twice-divorced beauty, bore a child Josephine, widely assumed to have been Napoleon’s. The letters between De Montholon and Albine after her early departure from St Helena, testify to the couple’s continuing love and give clues about his true intentions. Pining for his absent wife and children, De Montholon hit upon the idea of giving low doses of Arsenic to Napoleon as the only way of getting the British to send him home. The emperor died as the arsenic reacted violently, says this version of how Napoleon was done away with. It was not as a result of British conspiracy, but the outcome of a sex scam.

Coming from one head of the state to another. A set of 43 love letters sent to Queen Elizbeth I of England by the Earl of Essex were auctioned about three years ago in London for `A3166,500. The letters were written between 1591(when Essex started out as the Queen’s favourite courtier) and 1601(when he was beheaded for a rebellion).

The letters still carry the appropriate seals. They were probably returned to Essex’s mother, the Countess of Leicester, after the Queen’s death.

Hitler, dubbed as the craziest brute, also had a secret lover apart from his heartthrob Eva Brown whom he had married in his last moments in the bunker.

According to a new book Die Frauen Der Nazis III (Women of the Nazis III), Maria Reiter, called Mizzi by her friends, who passed away in 1992, was 16 and Hitler twice her age when they met in 1926. "She would attempt to kill herself when he dumped her to save his political career".

When Mizzi breathed her last in 1992, all she had left was just over five dollars and a bundle of yellowed letters from Hitler, according to the book, which offered one of the most curious insights into Hitler’s personal life.

Hitler’s ally Mussolini had also a mistress in Claretta Petacci. Recently it was reported that years of letters written by her to the Italian dictator had mysteriously vanished.

These letters had been shrouded in secrecy for decades, with the state denying historians any access. Now the entire correspondence from the year 1937 has gone missing. This material was classified super-sensitive "because its content was very personal", said Maurizo Fallace, head of central state archives in Rome. Under Italian law, such material has to be released 70 years after it was written, meaning that Petacci’s letters from the 1930s are starting to come to light.

The year 1937 is of intense interest to historians as it was then that Mussolini sealed Italy’s alliance with Hitler’s Nazi Germany and ultra-nationalist Japan.

Fallace, archives’ head, was delving into boxes of Petacci’s letters to start preparing them for public consultation when he found the 1937 letters had gone. "I simply have no idea what happened to them. I dearly hope we will be able to locate them," he said.

General Franco of Spain had written love letters to the daughter of a fellow officer in 1913. They were put to hammer in London some years back. They fetched `A3 10,000. They were bought by an elderly musician Antonio Facieros, who was the sole bidder. He said he had bought these decaying love letters for his "love of history" and not for the man, for he had never been a Franco supporter.

Some eminent litterateurs have also had interesting love lives. Byron described as "epitome of the romantic in his irregular life and emotion-charged poetry", had in particular a lady love who cared little for his feelings. In fact, she is hailed as the only one having broken the heart of this Casanova. Some years back a miniature painting showing her in bridal gown by John Hazlitt, one of the foremost miniature painters of the period, was auctioned in London for `A31,200.

Named Mary Ann Chaworth, whom the romantic poet had described as "my old love of all loves", was a distant cousin who remained resistant to his charms. She was two years senior to him and had married a local squire, Jack Musters.

When Byron first met Chaworth at 15, he did not take much interest in her and laughed off the idea of marriage. But this indifference soon became an infatuation when he discovered that she was in love with Musters.

Even though, according to a Byron specialist Emma Rutherford, Byron had his first sexual experience with Chaworth under a bridge in a boat, she dismissed him as a silly schoolboy.

Tucked into the back of the miniature was a lock of her hair — still dark and curly after almost 200 years. Lord Byron would have particularly treasured for he once sulked for days when she refused to give him a lock. In his poem The Dream, he expressed sadness after the love of his life married the "one who did not love her better" than he did. He thought he had detected a "tint of grief" in her face after she had married Musters and described it as "the shadow of inward strife, and an unquiet drooping of the eye, as if its lid were charged with unshed tears".

Eight years after she married, he met her and discovered that he was still in love with her. However, five years after that, in 1615, her marriage was on the rocks after several infidelities by her husband and she wrote to Lord Byron describing herself as "thin, pale and gloomy".

After that she wrote several more letters to him but the person who had once described her as "deep in my heart", had finally put her out of his mind. One thing that Byron had hated was supplicating a woman.

Only a few months ago, an author claimed to have revealed "the true story"of the Italian army officer who was the lover of D.H. Lawrence’s wife Frieda and model for Oliver Mellors, the hero of Lady Chatterley’s Lover (by D.H. Lawrence).

This author named Bevilacqua in his novel Through your body tells the "truth"about how all that came about.

According to Bevilacqua, he had learnt the happenings from a dashing Italian army officer Angelo Ravagli, who owned the villa on the Italian Riviera where Lawrence and his wife Frieda, a German aristocrat, had lodged in 1920s.

"Rivagli told me extraordinary secrets about Lawrence, who although a great theoretician of sex was not actually able to have physical relationship with women, certainly not with his wife," says Bevilacqua.

The brightest mind and the greatest scientist of the twentieth century who is also dubbed as one suffering from autism (incapable of forming social relations) had also an undercover love story that surfaced in recent years. He died in 1955.

An extraordinary cache of love letters, written by Einstein to a Soviet spy with whom he had a passionate affair, were auctioned in New York about five years ago.

Einstein and Russian spy Margarita Konenkova were introduced to each other in 1935 by the great scientists’s step-daughter Margot but it is not clear when their relationship began. The letters were written in 1945 and 1946 after Konenkova had returned to Moscow with her husband, the sculptor Sergei Konenkov, at the end of World War II.

Einstein was then 66. Written in stylish German, the letters were addressed to Konenkova’s Moscow home.