Word: offing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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It is Napoleon's Clisson et Eugénie, written shortly before the 26-year-old artillery officer, shabby, suffering from itch and malaria-appreciated only by a few of his colleagues-made his name by smashing a royalist coup in Paris on Oct. 4, 1795. Until now this...
Inspiration of Clisson et Eugénie was Napoleon's love affair with Désirée Clary, who later married his Marshal, Bernadotte, and became Queen of Sweden. A self-portrait opens the amazingly foresighted story: "Clisson was born for war. . . . He was meditating on the principles...
Then he met sweet, unaffected Eugénie, who "was like the song of the nightingale. ..." A fast worker, Clisson "soon imparted to his passion a quality of force and inflexibility which belonged to him." Here a big chunk of the story is missing-probably destroyed by Napoleon for reasons...
When the story resumes, Clisson and Eugénie have a family, are quarreling operatically because Eugénie is jealous. Climax comes when Clisson, heading a victorious army, learns he succeeded too well when he dispatched a handsome young officer to comfort Eugénie. "Adieu," he writes in...
What Napoleon thought of this tale is not recorded. But he lugged it around for 20 years, took it with him into exile on Saint Helena.