Word: napoleonism
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...Lies Here? (Putnam; $6.95), Author Thomas G. Wheeler picks bones of a more literal sort. His quite confident contention is that Napoleon's tomb at the Invalides never contained the body of the Emperor. The corpse reburied there in 1840 was a look-alike named Eugène Robeaud. This impostor, an infantryman chosen by Napoleon's secret police to stand in for the Emperor at various ceremonial and public functions, was eventually smuggled onto St. Helena in 1818 and substituted for the exiled Napoleon as a British prisoner. According to Wheeler, Robeaud soon died of arsenic poisoning...
MICHEL PONIATOWSKI, 52, Minister of State and Minister of Interior. "Ponia," as he is known everywhere, is Giscard's closest friend and crony in or out of the government. A patrician with royal Polish ancestry-one of his forebears was a marshal in Napoleon's army-Ponia-towski has known Giscard since student days, and he is distantly related to Giscard's wife. He helped Giscard set up his Independent Republican Party in 1966. Well before Pompidou's death, Poniatowski had worked quietly to line up the centrist parties' support that proved so crucial...
Burgess, the Christian moralist, appears to agree. His reasons are worked out in a fugue of ideas at the book's end where the exiled, cancerous-perhaps even dead-Napoleon encounters a mysterious female apparition. Since she coldly puts Napoleon in his place, she may well be Clio, the Muse of history...
...case, she declares that Beethoven's art is more important than Napoleon's military skill-"an art," she unkindly notes, "highly wasteful of its materials." Napoleon, whose mind or spirit at this point is soaring like the last movement of "The Eroica, "appears to get the message: musical forms may reveal divine essences, while his own kinetic life has been shaped by a gargantuan but finite will, whose only form was eventually a form of selfdelusion. Napoleon Symphony is, in some sense, an entertaining and elaborate joke. What the punch line comes down to is the simple fact...
Burgess has strong, not to say brash, opinions on practically everything of importance and is not overly modest. "If I may say so, writing Napoleon Symphony was probably more difficult than writing a War and Peace, which can go on as long as it likes, and does." He kicks another sacred Russian cow in Alexander Solzhenitsyn. "The most swollen reputation of our day," he observes of the Nobel-prizewinning exile. "They say he is a great writer because he is a great...