Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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THUS, in French blunt enough to be understood throughout his empire, Napoleon Bonaparte raised Jacques-Louis David to the heights. The Emperor's "first painter" had tasted glory before: a tradesman's son, he took part in the French Revolution, happily sketched victims going to the guillotine and became virtual art dictator of the republic under Robespierre. After Robespierre's downfall, he spent seven months behind bars. In 1804, the year of Napoleon's decree, David was 56 and a bit tired of ups and downs. Still, the emperor could not have made' a better...
...portrait opposite, which has been purchased by the Kress Foundation for Washington's National Gallery, proves the point. Napoleon stands plump and solemn in the white satiny knickers and gold epaulets of a general of the Chasseurs of his own Imperial Guard. He wears dangling on a red ribbon the medal of the Legion of Honor, which he himself instituted. Every detail of the picture shows David's utter and icy control of his medium; the whole shows something more-his red-hot hero worship. For all its artificiality of costume and scene, his picture gives Napoleon...
...matters that required an imperious technique, Napoleon dropped duplicity overboard and went straight to the point. At a ball in Warsaw he saw his future mistress, Marie Walewska, for the first time, and brusquely gave her the imperial works: "I saw no one but you, I admired no one but you, I want no one but you. Answer me at once, and assuage the impatient passion of 'N.' " Only with his wife Josephine, whom he wooed and married before his own greatness was assured, did he show any trace of human frailty. "Had I a heart so base...
Monarch of All Moods. Napoleon took proud delight in acts of clemency. When a German traitor's wife burst into tears on being shown an incriminating letter written by her husband, Napoleon smugly informed Josephine that he had said to the weeping woman: "Madam, you can throw that letter into the fire: I shall never be strong enough to punish your husband." But clemency never interfered with policy. "You must make the skipper speak," he orders, of a sea captain suspected of spying for the English. "You can . . . squeeze his thumbs under the hammer of a musket...
...Napoleon's Letters succeed in their aim of revealing the many sides of Napoleon's character, but they show in particular the man whose vanity was so prodigious that when exiled to the island of Elba, he referred to his 18 marines as "My Guard" and to his small boats as "the Navy." And anyone who wants to get on in the world at any cost will find in the Letters many a useful price...