Word: napoleons
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...epidemic spread as fast as ships could carry infected passengers round the world. The highest mortality occurred in India, where 12.5 million people died. Very few places remained influenza-free because of fanatically enforced quarantine regulations. Among them were the South Atlantic island of St. Helena, Napoleon's last home, and a U.S. naval training station in San Francisco Bay, where drinking fountains were sterilized hourly with blowtorches. Nearly everywhere else life for the survivors changed radically. Moviehouses, restaurants and concert halls were ordered shut. Courting became medically dangerous. A sort of mass purdah prevailed as millions learned...
Some of the royals have gone to work. Prince Louis Murat, whose great-great-great grandfather briefly ruled the kingdom of Naples in Napoleon's day, is president of Compagnie Ferguson Morrison-Knudsen, a Paris-based subsidiary of America's Morrison-Knudsen Co., while Michael of Rumania is a stockbroker in Lausanne. Some live off the money they or their family got out of the country. Others, like Italy's Umberto, manage very well with the help of monarchist friends who either hope to restore them to power or are moved by a sense of nostalgia...
Here, at least, as the lights fade and the mysterious lady and "le Petit Caporal" watch the dispatches burning in the dark, their faces glowing in the flickering flames, one wonders who has finally won, if Napoleon has conquered yet another woman, or if he has met his Fireloo...
...THIS starts when Napoleon finds out that his temptress is part English and part Irish. The combination, he says, after having been thoroughly fooled, may be the only formula to defeat him on the battlefield--a foreboding of his defeat by the Irish-born General Wellington leading the English army at Waterloo...
Bonnie Brewster is a match for Mosca's bravado. The way the strange lady shifts the burden of guilt to Napoleon demands a sort of subtle feminine guile that just doesn't come through in Shaw's words, something impossible to describe really. That's one of the attractions of the play--it's almost as if Shaw were testing the acting abilities of his two favorite performers; whoever acted better would convince the audience that he or she had won in this battle of the minds...