Word: napoleonism
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...Napoleon sulked in Cairo. In France, his beloved, highly sexed wife, Josephine, was conducting an appallingly public affair with a young lieutenant named Hippolyte Charles. It was the talk of the army. Cuckolded, Napoleon fretted and gnashed his teeth. He sounded curiously helpless. "It's a sad situation," he wrote to his brother, "to have so many conflicting sentiments about a single person in one's heart...
...Napoleon consoled himself by taking to bed the wife of one of his young lieutenants in Egypt; he dispatched the poor husband back to France on an "urgent secret mission." Napoleon set up housekeeping with the woman, arranged a quickie divorce for her, but then, some months later, breezily abandoned her by telling her one afternoon that he was off to Alexandria to check the fortifications. She never saw him again...
...Egyptian adventure deteriorated. The people of Cairo rose in general insurrection. Napoleon bombarded al-Azhar, the city's largest mosque, then sacked it and allowed his troops to run amok, killing men, women and children in the streets. The bloom was off the liberation. Napoleon sought glory northward, marching toward Syria. He took Jaffa. Four thousand prisoners, who had been promised their lives, were marched before Napoleon's tent; he asked peevishly, "What am I supposed to do with them?" They were herded to the beach and slaughtered in the surf...
...Bonaparte laid siege to Acre but took a pounding and gave it up. Not for nothing was Napoleon the great-grandfather of spin. His official Army Bulletin proclaimed a great victory. When his secretary protested such a colossal lie, Napoleon said with a smile, "Mon cher, you are a simpleton. You really don't understand a thing...
...Napoleon eventually scurried back to France, abandoning the remnants of his army to straggle home as best they could...