Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...basic French foreign policy is, reputedly, one of grandeur, a reassertion of the historic role of France in world affairs. It is a simple compound, one part reality to five parts romantic memory of Napoleon and Louis XIV and four parts de Gaulle's concept of his personal destiny. In getting rid of the immobilism that characterized the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle and his government have picked up a generous share of political illusions, and chief among them is the grandeur upon which their diplomacy is based...
Cosimo becomes famous. Voltaire inquires about him, and when Napoleon visits Ombrosa he chats with Cosimo, risking a stiff neck as he looks up to the treed man. Cosimo has adventures with bandits and pirates that Douglas Fairbanks Sr. would have been embarrassed to find in a movie script, and enjoys a love affair that is as notable for its acrobatics as for its passion. He is neither an outcast nor a misanthrope. In fact, he is a heroic do-gooder whose office just happens to be a forked tree...
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...
Dinner and what followed were usually the most taxing of rituals. At 5 p.m., everyone assembled in the dining room at Longwood, Napoleon's home, officers in dress uniform, ladies in low-cut gowns. Napoleon bolted his food, and often ate with his hands. After dinner, there were games. If the game was chess, the officers had to stand throughout, and Napoleon almost invariably lost unless the other player sycophantically threw the game. At other times, Napoleon read aloud from Racine, Corneille and Moliere. Sometimes he held the little band spellbound with accounts of his great campaigns. After...
...last days on St. Helena had little romance. Defections and deportations had riddled his last command. He was in agony, either from stomach cancer or a perforated ulcer, but his doctors were too incompetent to diagnose his case. At dawn on May 5, 1821, with his mind wandering, Napoleon said, "Who retreats?", then: "At the head of the army." They were his last words...