Word: napoleonism
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...Well,' [said the Emperor], 'that's not very bright for an engineer-God's teeth!'" Reason for Napoleon's impatience: he only hoped to get some exercise seesawing with his grand marshal...
...finest piece of work since the Romans," said Napoleon of General Henri-Gatien Bertrand's bridging of the Danube in 1809. Four years later, Napoleon made Bertrand grand marshal of the imperial palace, and in this capacity the old soldier followed his master into exile at St. Helena. When Bertrand died, in 1844, he bequeathed his notebooks of the exile to his daughter Hortense, who in turn entrusted them to a French bureaucrat with orders to publish them 25 years after her death. All in all, it was not until 1946 that the grand marshal's strongbox...
...after the first thrill of emotion, what a formidable surprise!" says Transcriber Paul Fleuriot de Langle. The papers comprise a diary which records Napoleon's conversations throughout the exile, and a regular summary of daily court life. But everything was written in a private shorthand of hieroglyphic complexity, e.g., "N.a. j. et. d. sa. sal. de bil une Ba; il. dde au Gm. sil sa. ce. q. c'e. C'une ma. de G. il d. dab. q. cest un bal. p. ses enf. Est ce p. ser. a desc. sur un remp...
Armed with a magnifying glass and cheered on by old Napoleon buffs, De Langle began to unscramble the gibberish. He found that General Bertrand had made the job still more difficult by referring to himself not as "I," but as "Bertrand," or "the Grand Maréchal," or worst of all, since it invited confusion with Napoleon himself, as "he." It was three long years before De Langle could figure out who was talking to whom about what (at times even proper names were abbreviated to initials), and could interpret the above example...
...Napoleon has had a seesaw installed in the billiard room, and he asked the Grand Maréchal if he had any idea what...