Word: napoleon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Madame Mère, Napoleon's mother, was the most impressive personage on the Napoleonic scene. Tiny, skinny, weasel-eyed and taciturn, she looked like a witch in a fairy tale and held her family under an unshakable spell...
...husband Carlo, a foppish ne'er-do-well, died in 1785; Napoleon was essentially his mother's creation. "France is ablaze," she told him as a youth, "but it is a noble bonfire, my son, and worth the risk of getting burnt." Icily realistic, she threw cold water on his early sizzling success. "Let's hope it lasts," she said at his coronation. Later she advised against involvement in Spain and Russia, Napoleon's two biggest mistakes. Eerily vatic, she was "informed" of his death on the very day it happened, 5,000 miles away...
...Elisa, Napoleon's eldest sister, was a shrewd, bald bluestocking with "the soul of a libertine in the body of a spinster" and only two claims to fame: 1) she made a fortune selling marble busts of her brother, and 2) to preserve her properties, she turned traitor and delivered Florence to the allies...
...Pauline, Napoleon's second sister, generally considered the most likable of the Bonapartes, was a nymphomaniac who, according to Stacton's account, "treated men as she treated clothes: if she did not like them, she wore them only once; if she did, she wore them out." In Auguste de Forbin, a society painter "endowed with a usable gigantism," she found a man who wore her out. To the horror of her husband, Prince Camillo Borghese, she went through money even faster than men, but she always found cash when Big Brother needed it. Were she and Napoleon lovers...
...Jerome, Napoleon's youngest brother, a pretty-faced punk known as Fifi, was the black sheep of the family. At 21, when Napoleon balked at his marriage to a Baltimore heiress named Betsy Patterson, he blithely abandoned the girl-with child-and concluded an alliance with Catherine of Wurttemberg. As King of Westphalia, he employed so many mistresses and staged such lavish entertainments (among them an operetta performed stark naked) that the kingdom went bankrupt within seven years. In 1812 he deserted his troops in Russia, and in 1840 he sold his 20-year-old daughter for several million...