Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...long-lost memoirs,* Caulaincourt cleared up a major Napoleonic mystery with his account of Ragusa's treachery, clarified another with his account of Napoleon's attempted suicide a week later. Last year the first volume of this extraordinary document was offered U. S. readers under the title With Napoleon in Russia. Last week the second and concluding volume retraced the stages of the Emperor's decline to the time of his departure for Elba. Together the two books constitute an amazing picture of the smashing of a world power, the first volume more readable as a connected...
...outspoken he often exasperated Napoleon, Caulaincourt had opposed the war with Russia, refused to flatter his Emperor, so that, although the Corsican tormented his General, Napoleon also had a nervous desire for his praise and a respect for his honesty. This feeling deepened as Napoleon went down, until on the night of his attempted suicide he poured out his story to Caulaincourt alone while the sweat broke out on his sunken features and he waited for the poison to take effect. The poison was opium, belladonna and white hellebore. Napoleon's stomach rejected it and in place...
According to Caulaincourt, the Empire ended with Ragusa's treachery; what followed were the convulsions of its death-agony. Another addition to the 40,000 books about Napoleon, Author Aubry's St. Helena, also published last week, carries the story of Napoleon's personal decline to its miserable conclusion. An exhaustive record of the Emperor's last six years, St. Helena is a superb piece of composition that remains interesting through its 500 pages. Beginning with Waterloo, it clips along like a good melodrama through Napoleon's flight, his success in winning the friendship...
...shabby five-room cottage at Longwood, on a bleak plateau on the island, the tragi-comedy of Napoleon's exile worked itself out. He adjusted himself to it more readily than anyone else. He romped with the children, teased the pretty, high-spirited 14-year-old Betsy Balcolme, a St. Helena heiress who played tricks on him, pulled his hair, once almost killed him with one of her pranks. Making a great fuss over his rights, Napoleon outsmarted his jailers almost from habit, played on the sympathies of Europe, started such rumors that presently a large body of troops...
...Napoleon, who had liked his other jailers, hated Lowe from the start. He believed, or pretended to believe, that Lowe was going to kill him. Always bluffing, Napoleon drove Lowe to distraction, created parliamentary crises in London, steered his ill-assorted little company so artfully they became an efficient propaganda and espionage apparatus. Meanwhile he waddled around Longwood, recalling his great days, making the whole company work on his memoirs. Talking as much as Samuel Johnson, the imperial chatterbox spun out his pungent, cynical comments, salting his malice with sudden acts of kindness, keeping his followers in line like...