Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Each Sunday a gaunt, austere figure with sideburns, long frock coat and tight, narrow trousers leaves his home in Paris' Latin Quarter, crosses the Seine and heads for Père-Lachaise Cemetery. For hours he strolls among the dead marshals, statesmen and courtiers of the dead Napoleonic Empire; he never fails to pause before the tombstone of the Comtesse de Girardin, the greatest beauty of the Little Corporal's court. Jean Auguste Louis Armand Fèvre, by profession a dealer in rare books, by appearance a bourgeois gentleman of Napoleon's day, has chosen to live...
...other mortals . . . plastered on their faces, they might have been entering Paradise . . . Suddenly a peanut-shaped head, surmounted by a military haircut and decked off with a magnificent pair of long moustaches, rose above them . . . one hand slipped into his overcoat and the other folded behind him, a la Napoleon . . . Comrade Stalin stood posed before the saints and worshippers...
...underwriters. They have found Lloyd's underwriters willing to bet on any risk if the customer has an insurable interest, i.e., a customer can insure that a horse will run in a race, but not that he will win. (In 1813, before that requirement, a client insured Napoleon's life & liberty for ?500.) Four-fifths of all U.S. commercial airliners are reinsured with Lloyd's members; its syndicates paid out millions in claims after the Texas City disaster...
...Olympian fire. Local legends say that the Abkhasians are endowed with a beauty that must one day prove their undoing, but from the Caucasus last week came news that one of the handsomest of them all was still doing fine. Mamsir Kiut was a boy of 17 when Napoleon marched on Moscow. In the village of Kindig, he took time off from tending his chickens and pruning his vines, to pose in turban-like bashlyk for a 154th birthday portrait...
...years, Jeanne de Valois was never canonized. Her "process," begun in 1775, was delayed first by unusual strictness on the part of the Congregation of Rites, then by the French Revolution (no French bishop dared offend Napoleon by pushing the sainthood of a member of the old regime). In 1905, when the process was finally resumed, authorities insisted that at least one more miracle would be necessary. In 1932 occurred what was regarded as an authentic miracle: French Nun Marta Fourrier, apparently on the verge of death from a duodenal ulcer, was suddenly cured when someone at her bedside called...