Word: napoleonism
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...interests me. I condemned him to death and he condemned me in turn. We are both condemned men." Over De Gaulle's resignation as President, he sniffed contemptuously: "I stayed on when the difficulties were harder to bear." De Gaulle, he insisted, "wants to play the part of Napoleon," but his reputation as a military strategist stems only from the fact that "he explained battles of mine so well...
...retreat from Moscow was over; in a room at Fontainebleau, the defeated Emperor Napoleon meditated suicide. "Preceded by the enormous Cossacks of the Imperial Guard . . . [Tsar Alexander I] rode slowly through the streets. In gaping astonishment the citizens of Paris gazed upon their conqueror. His enormous feet were thrust into stirrups of wrought gold . . . above the gold collar . . . they saw the face of a benignant calf...
...will be spitted like a hog," muttered one of Napoleon's unimaginative professionals. But Henri Beyle, in whom genius and absurdity were uniquely compounded, somehow survived-and under the pen name of "Stendhal" immortalized his adventures in soldiery in two great works of fiction: The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma...
...time he returned with Napoleon's army from the invasion of Italy, Henri was, and remained, says Author Josephson, "the eternal strategist in the game of life and sex, always armed with . . . systems, prescriptions, stratagems, and nearly always, comically enough, fated to lose his weapons, and his plans, midway in the contest." He needed stratagems. By his own admission, he was as fat and homely as an "Italian butcher boy"; and despite his talkative, romantic arrogance and fashionable dress, he was terrified of ridicule and feminine rebuffs...
...Sparkling Crystals. When Napoleon fell, Henri Beyle, who had participated in the disastrous invasion of Russia, fell with him. Disgraced, penniless, the young, atheistic republican stood on a Paris sidewalk and stared at the "hideous apparition" of "fat King Louis XVIII." Henri fled to Italy...