Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...most wanted men, trailing from country to country, spying, mounting fantastic plots and making sporadic forays into his homeland. In London, where he was rapturously welcomed, Orsini let his vanity drive him to his last, most hare-brained exploit-an attempt on the life of France's Emperor Napoleon III. It was a crazy choice, because the Emperor had declared himself ready to fight for the cause of Italian independence. But, Orsini argued, if only Napoleon were removed, all other thrones in Europe would topple...
...beginning of 1858, Orsini and three Italian fellow conspirators had arrived in Paris with their cargo of "what looked like a clutch of monstrous birds' eggs, spiny and fantastic." On the appointed night Orsini and his friends joined the crowd in the Rue Lepelletier, down which Louis Napoleon and Empress Eugénie were about to drive to the opera...
...Paume (literally, game of palm) was a royal indoor tennis court built by Napoleon III in 1862. The game, known as jeu de courte paume, derived from a sort of handball to which racquets were added, was for centuries the rage in France. In the 1890s the game lost popularity to English lawn tennis...
...within his code, a gentle man, beloved by officers and crew. His sailors were "brave fellows" and a "band of brothers." Nelson set a good table and a stern example. That he lived to save Europe from Napoleon is something of a miracle, and British Biographer Warner (a naval buff from the time he sat at Caius College, Cambridge, beneath a portrait of Nelson's father) has shown a hagiographer's diligence in turning over the records of England's seagoing lay saint...
...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 was literally a holy horror of the French; they would not even eat from a plate a Frenchman had touched. When they were brought...