Word: gourgaud
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Napoleon's young aide-de-camp, General Gaspard Gourgaud, left a journal describing the Emperor's last years on St. Helena, a speck of British territory in the South Atlantic. Gourgaud's entries, unintentionally hilarious, record the great man's stupendous banality after he lost the thing that made him interesting -- his power. "October 21 (1815). I walk with the Emperor in the garden, and we discuss women. He maintains that a young man should not run after them . . . November 5. The Grand Marshal (Montholon) is angry because the Emperor told him he was nothing but a ninny . . . January...
Apart from Lowe's plaguy tactics. Napoleon's own skeleton court was a prickly lot. Three officers and a secretary-Marshal Bertrand, Count de Montholon, General Gourgaud, Count Las Cases-had accompanied him into exile out of mixed motives of avarice, reflected glory and-last and least-devotion. It was believed that Napoleon had 6,000,000 francs in Europe (he actually had half of that). Bertrand was perhaps the least self-seeking, but he lost status when Mme. Bertrand refused to become Napoleon's mistress. With or without the hint, Mme. de Montholon was a wily...
Chess, Anyone? As for Gourgaud, he was a temperamental bachelor who seems to have had a homosexual crush on Napoleon, but Bonaparte was strictly heterosexual, and Gourgaud eventually left the island in a vicious pet. Las Cases had gone to St. Helena for the book he knew Napoleon had in him, and took dictation till his eyes gave out. Indeed, they all took dictation and kept journals, perhaps suspecting posterity's avalanche of books about Napoleon, though some of the entries are revealingly non-Napoleonic, e.g., Gourgaud's statement that if Las Cases tried...
...Boswell. He was so open in his admiration for the Emperor that his hard-eyed rivals called him "Rapture." Another follower was Charles Tristan de Montholon, a born courtier who accompanied Napoleon into exile because his debts were so great he could go nowhere else. Swaggering, hypersensitive, jealous Caspar Gourgaud also went along because he had no other choice. General Henri Gratien Bertrand, Napoleon's Grand Marshal, tall, skinny and timid, "had the face of a middle-aged woman who had for some unexplained reason taken to side-burns." Humorously aware of the ridiculousness of his little company, Napoleon...
...solidarity of the little group begins to splinter. The generals complain of pains and illness, long to be away. The faithful Corsican attendant Cipriani (Jules Epailly) dies. Las Cases (Alan Wheatley), smugly cherishing his biographical notes, is sent away by the British -without his notes. Gourgaud (Joseph Macaulay), sulking like a jealous mistress when anyone else approaches his idol, finds his lot unendurable, weeps, departs. Suffering from confinement and a bad liver, Napoleon is haunted at night by the spectres of his mistakes. He cannot forget, he says, that if he had not attacked so soon at Waterloo, he would...
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