Word: napoleons
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...Path of Napoleon. De Lattre and his 14th Infantry Division were posted at Rethel, near Reims, when the Nazis struck in May 1940. His was one of the handful of French units that showed up well amid general disaster; he hurled the Germans back six times before the crumbling line on his left flank forced the French command to order his retreat. He retreated fighting. Yet he found time to analyze the causes of the French defeat and to apply the lessons in practice. By picking up stray trucks and equipment wherever he could, he managed to reorganize his units...
...return to Brussels, and Le Reposoir lends itself to such dreams. Built in the 18th Century, it is nicknamed le coteau des altesses-the hill of the highnesses. Among others who have lived there and dreamed of lost diadems were Louis Bonaparte's Queen Hortense and Napoleon's Empress Josephine...
...first noteworthy member of the Torlonia family (which came from France to Italy in the 18th Century) was Giovanni, a rag & bone merchant who became one of Europe's greatest financiers, lent money to kings and even to Napoleon's high-living kin. He bought a couple of ancient dukedoms, but Roman aristocracy-whose thin blue lineage is longer than almost anybody else's-sneered at the upstart. At one of Giovanni's lavish fetes, the French novelist Stendhal overheard a great Roman lady say: "Torlonia should not come to his own balls . . . One sees only...
Each Sunday a gaunt, austere figure with sideburns, long frock coat and tight, narrow trousers leaves his home in Paris' Latin Quarter, crosses the Seine and heads for Père-Lachaise Cemetery. For hours he strolls among the dead marshals, statesmen and courtiers of the dead Napoleonic Empire; he never fails to pause before the tombstone of the Comtesse de Girardin, the greatest beauty of the Little Corporal's court. Jean Auguste Louis Armand Fèvre, by profession a dealer in rare books, by appearance a bourgeois gentleman of Napoleon's day, has chosen to live...
...dingy, one-room flat on the Rue Bonaparte, oil lamps and candles light up the empire fauteuils, the portraits of Napoleon and the etchings of Napoleon's greatest battles. Fèvre has never ridden in the subway or a bus; he steadfastly refuses to switch on an electric light or read a daily paper. "What men call progress," he says bitterly, "is nothing but a sham. Transportation has improved, but noble sentiments become rarer...