Word: napoleons
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...Napoleon as he really was, French Historian Jean Savant went on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet. He rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations apart like ripe fruit to show that "given 500,000 men, one can do anything...
...French all the harm I can." So said the pint-sized (5 ft. 2 in.), pale-faced Corsican named Buonaparte, who shunned his military schoolmates, read Plutarch in the library instead of playing games. Classmate Louis de Bourrienne also had the luck to be standing with 23-year-old Napoleon, then an out-at-the-elbow discharged officer, as he watched the howling mob sweep through the Tuileries to crown Louis XVI with the red cap of Liberty. He recorded young Buonaparte's Italian exclamation: "Che coglione! How could they let that rabble in? They should have swept away...
...talents Buonaparte brought to post-revolutionary France. "Can one be revolutionary enough? Marat and Robespierre, those are my saints!" he proclaimed at the Siege of Toulon. The sentiments gave him his general's epaulets at the age of 24. But witty young Victorine de Chastenay, with whom Napoleon played parlor games, was quick to see that "the republican general had no republican principles or beliefs...
...wanton Creole widow, Rose-Josephine de Beauharnais. A French marriage, he felt, would make him French, and he changed his name accordingly, dropping the "u." Later he admitted that Josephine had come straight from another lover's bed, but there was sentiment of a sort. On St. Helena Napoleon confessed: "I really did love her; I had no respect for her. She was too much of a liar. But there was something taking about her. She was a true woman. She had the prettiest little tail imaginable...
...Napoleon known to history emerged with incredible rapidity. The small figure in his green chasseur's uniform and white waistcoat and breeches became a kind of miniature god of war who presided over incredible carnage without blinking. After the defeat at Moscow. Napoleon told Austria's Metternich: "The French can't complain of me. To spare them. I've sacrificed Germans and Poles. I lost 300,000 men, but only 30,000 were French." Retorted Metternich sharply: "You forget, Sire, that you are speaking to a German...