Word: napoleons
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...more than 100 died in an 18-month period of hepatitis and amoebic dysentery. A rat-infested house on the atherapeutic isle served as prison for the man who had marched vast armies from Moscow to Madrid, and once ruled half the Christian world. Only a few years before, Napoleon had unwittingly forecast his fate: "It is but a step from the sublime to the ridiculous...
...life of Napoleon and his retinue on St. Helena is a kind of tragicomic parody of those scenes in Shakespeare where the king moves his court to some enchanted forest to frolic and philosophize. In a graphic, day-by-day account of the exile years, Historian Ralph Korngold reveals the constant bickering and backbiting of the Napoleonic entourage. Napoleon himself, argues Korngold, may have been hounded to a premature death by the erratic restrictions and petty cruelties of the British governor, Sir Hudson Lowe, a fussy, indecisive simpleton...
Mail Call. Napoleon took an immediate dislike to Lowe ("a most villainous face") and regularly called him a "hired assassin" with "hyena's eyes." Lowe insisted that Napoleon be referred to as "General Bonaparte"; Napoleon insisted that he was the "Emperor Napoleon," and refused to accept his mail or his own doctor's reports unless so addressed. When
Lowe had the mail thrown on Napoleon's table, Napoleon barred his doors and threatened to make a corpse of any British officer who broke them down. None did. While the British themselves were spending ?250,000 a year to guard Napoleon, Lowe was ordered to cut Bonaparte's household from ?18,000 to ?8,000. Napoleon promptly had his table silver pounded into a shapeless mass, weighed and sold openly in town. Vindictively Lowe restricted Napoleon to a shadeless plain for horseback riding, and forbade him to enter his own garden after dusk...
Apart from Lowe's plaguy tactics. Napoleon's own skeleton court was a prickly lot. Three officers and a secretary-Marshal Bertrand, Count de Montholon, General Gourgaud, Count Las Cases-had accompanied him into exile out of mixed motives of avarice, reflected glory and-last and least-devotion. It was believed that Napoleon had 6,000,000 francs in Europe (he actually had half of that). Bertrand was perhaps the least self-seeking, but he lost status when Mme. Bertrand refused to become Napoleon's mistress. With or without the hint, Mme. de Montholon was a wily...