Napoleon Bonaparte was keen to learn English while in exile, documents shown in Britain for the first time reveal. The deposed French emperor apparently wanted to learn the language of his foes, so he could read what the London papers were writing about him. Scraps of paper from his English lessons in captivity on the island of St Helena, go on show at London's National Maritime Museum on Thursday. They include lines of French haltingly translated by Napoleon into English. Count Emmanuel de las Cases, who accompanied the emperor into exile after he surrendered to the English at the Battle of Waterloo, wrote about his desire to learn the language in his memoirs. According to him, Napoleon had his first lesson on January 17, 1816, when he asked las Cases to dictate to him some sentences in French, which he then translated, using a table of auxiliary verbs and a dictionary.