Word: corsican
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...movie abounds with such scenes, and Bonaparte grows steadily larger. By the end of the battle of Toulon--in which Napoleon first receives the command of a major force and then launcnes an offensive despite a torrential storm--nature ceases to struggle with the Corsican. Instead, it pays homage to him by providing hail to beat the drums of dead soldiers to announce his victory. And although the film takes him only so far as the beginning of his campaign into Italy in 1976--a full eight years before he became emperor--it seems that at any second Napoleon...
...dynamic victor of Austerlitz, or the epic exile, but a man with a vision of the Universal Republic, schooled in politics by the French Revolution, in military art by genius. Studying the Corsican Eagle from military school to the first Italian campaign, Gance places the man opposite a tableau of the Revolution. And Napoleon watches it, as the convention destroys the constitutional monarchy and then itself, and the Reign of Terror seizes France. Amid the confusion, he is isolated, detached, observant...
...adventurer. Returning to Corsica during the first year of the Revolution, he tries in vain to persuade the government to ally itself with France. Declared an outlaw, he snatches the Tricolor and rides toward the coast, chased by troops through the Corsican countryside. He clambers aboard a small boat with no oars and no sail; hoisting the Tricolor, he sets sail for France...
...film is well-received, but history turns nasty on Abel Gance. Six months after Napoleon, Al Jolson does a little softshoe number; talkies are in, Polyvision is out. In desperation and disgust, Gance burns part of the footage. Who cares now where the life of the Corsican Eagle ends up? The reels are dispersed across the globe...
...enterprising 19th century Corsican named Angelo Mariani had the notion of blending the coca leaf with fine wine, which he marketed under the name of Vin Mariani. Mariani collected endorsements from Popes Leo XIII and Pius X, President McKinley and the Kings of Spain, Greece, and Norway and Sweden, as well as such literary luminaries as Jules Verne, Alexandre Dumas and Emile Zola. French Sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, designer of the Statue of Liberty, swore that if he had only savored Vin Mariani earlier, he would have built the old girl hundreds of meters higher...