Personal Details

As a writer, especially a fiction writer, I collect details and search for interesting, memorable ways to describe them.  My quest to capture the essence of Napoleon requires recreating, first in my mind and then in my readers’ imaginations, a sense of his everyday life.  For example, when he got out of bed, did his bare feet touch the floor or did he immediately put on slippers? When on campaign, what did he use to brush his teeth?  We know he often soaked for hours in a tub, but did he prefer the water steaming hot or merely tepid?  Does anyone still make the type of licorice he liked to chew or the snuff he took?  What was the view from his room at military school in Brienne? It’s often easier to find the details of his battles than the minutia of his daily life, but these are facts I must collect to write this book.

We’re told he was overly sensitive to odors and liked to rub eau de cologne over his body.   In exile on remote St Helena, his personal staff had to replicate the scent he liked from locally-available materials.  Now, a French perfume laboratory has reconstituted what they claim is the authentic formula as “the only olfactory recollection we have from the Emperor.” It has a masculine, outdoors tang, with heavy overtones of pine and a hint of something similar to crushed bay leaves.  I’m reminded of Old Spice.