This fall, The Delmarva Review published my short story, “Mrs. Morrisette.” Now, they’ve nominated it for inclusion in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology. According to the Pushcart website, “The Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.” Next April, I’ll find […]
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Young Napoleon, growing up in a household in which his mother seemed always to be pregnant, sought out solitary refuges. One was a wooden lean-to on the family porch, another was a grotto on the outskirts of Ajaccio. Legend says he was hiding in this second spot, when his father and the Count de Marbeuf
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“Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable. When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.” Napoleon Bonaparte (from Napoleon: In His Own Words, 1916, edited by Jules Bertaut) These words, attributed to Napoleon, reflect the
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In 1778, nine-year-old Napoleon left Ajaccio, Corsica to attend French military academy. In France, his fellow students mocked his foreign accent and chip-on-the-shoulder Corsican patriotism. Eight years later, when he returned home for the first time, the locals thought him “Frenchified.” He struggled to relearn his childhood language and sought out old friends and places,
A Corsican in France, A Frenchman in Corsica Read More »
While I focused on writing my novel (working title: The Eaglet’s Legacy), October has flown by. As a final post before November, here’s a reminder to take a look at the video of photos from my trip to St Helena.
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Before Napoleon died in 1821, the British government had instructed Governor Hudson Lowe that the emperor’s body was to stay on St Helena. A burial site was chosen about a mile from Longwood House on land owned by the merchant Richard Torbett. Initially, Torbett received £650 as an indemnity plus an annual subsidy of £50,
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Last weekend, my husband Bert and I attended the Napoleonic Historical Society’s annual conference. Held this year in Baltimore, Maryland, the agenda included lectures on Napoleonic topics as well as NHS president Sheperd Paine’s excellent overview of the War of 1812, in which the Baltimore region played a part. (Francis Scott Key wrote the Star
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Last weekend at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, I came across Francisco Goya’s stunning painting of the Napoleonic general Nicolas Philippe Guye. Guye had been wounded at Austerlitz and later served as aide-de-camp to Napoleon’s older brother Joseph. In 1810, when Goya painted this portrait, Guye was governor of Seville and Joseph
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One of my blog readers commented on the Not Finding Much Napoleon at the Louvre post that “sadly, [I] missed the excellent romantic painting of a Napoleonic-era cavalry officer by Géricault.” His comment sent me scrambling for the DVD where I store my Louvre photos, certain I remembered the piece he had in mind. Sure
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At the Napoleon birthday celebration at Fort Myer, Napoleon Historical Society member Vince Hawkins displayed his plaster death mask of the Emperor. It’s been authenticated as one of only a hundred struck from the original that the attending doctor, Dr Antommarchi, created two days after Napoleon’s death in 1821. Napoleonic death masks appear in
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