Word: emperor
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...maintain that a single African ancestor, however remote, makes a man Negro. About 60 generations have passed since the heyday of the Roman Empire; so an American of European ancestry is descended from 2 60 (1,152,921,504,606,846,976) ancestors at the time of the Emperor Hadrian. This immense figure is not to be taken literally, but it surely means that people with ancestors who lived in the Roman Empire, including England and part of Germany, are descended from a broad cut of the empire's population...
...conquerors. Nor is it simply a great and exciting war story. To Ségur, as it did to most who survived it, the retreat from Moscow had a deeper personal and political meaning. As a ruined aristocrat who embraced the French Revolution and became aide-decamp to the Emperor, Ségur took the long, cold view...
Copy for Tolstoy. Ségur was seldom far from the Emperor's side during the five fearful months that it took to unravel Napoleon's grand design. He was close enough to hear Napoleon exclaim as he came within sight of the Muscovite capital of logs and gilded domes: "So here at last is that famous city! It was high time!" The remark was used by Tolstoy in War and Peace; probably one of the original French editions of Ségur's journal (first in 1824) was before Tolstoy as he wrote his masterpiece...
...wonderfully evokes the opening scenes of the disastrous war, with the Emperor surrounded by men whom he had named princes and dukes titled for victories in a dozen countries. The great host glittered with invincibility, and the men were still heady with the idea that they represented liberty under arms. They had only to cross the Niemen into Russian territory, and "love and gratitude" would welcome them...
Holy Horror. But sinister portents made the true picture clear. The Emperor's horse fell ("A Roman would turn back," someone said); a gigantic thunderstorm destroyed, among other things, 10,000 horses. Worst of all, there were no Russians to defeat. Ségur describes in familiar scenes how the Grande Armée advanced into silent wastes; the aristocrats burned their houses and took their serfs with them to the East. Napoleon snapped: "Do you think I have come all this way just to conquer these huts?" The Russians were inspired-not by liberty-but by what...