Margaret’s Blog

No Napoleon today—we went Great White Shark cage-diving instead.  Here’s one of the seventeen friends we made. He’s about twelve feet long, and looked mighty hungry, although thousands of seals were raising pups on a nearby island. I figured they’d probably be much tastier than me.

Today, the 190th anniversary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death on St Helena, was our first day in South Africa.  We commemorated the occasion with a visit to Groot (Estate) Constantia, just outside of Cape Town. One of the few pleasures Napoleon experienced during his six-year exile on St Helena was the Grand Constance sweet white wine […]

It’s the tiny white speck in the south Atlantic. Few places on this planet become more remote over time, but St Helena has.  In 1816, when Napoleon was exiled there, as many as a thousand ships a year called at the island.  Back then, before the Suez Canal, it was a stopover for ships from […]

When I was in fourth grade, I had to do a project on my home state, which my teacher, the ever-rigid Mrs. Wall, defined as a person’s birthplace.  I was annoyed:  I had been born in Maryland because that’s where Bethesda Naval Hospital is.  At the time my Navy family lived in Virginia.  I felt […]

I’ve been thinking back about my visit to Brienne, the French country town where Napoleon attended his first military school from age nine to fifteen.  By all accounts he grew up isolated, mocked for his accent and poverty.   Even his politics brought derision as this drawing—the earliest known Napoleonic caricature—shows.  In it, a fellow student […]

We Americans think the French don’t like us, and, in turn, we portray them as ungrateful for our aid during the World Wars.  Remember Freedom Fries in 2003?  Perhaps, we should apologize for that one since sadly they were right about Iraqi WMDs. A quick look around Paris tells you the French find kinship in […]

We’re home from our March travels to Paris and Corsica.   First, I had to catch up all I’d missed while away; now I’m struggling to prepare for our month-long St Helena voyage in May.  Meanwhile, there’s tons more to write about Paris and Corsica.  So stick with me—the adventure has just begun! One of my […]

I arrived in Corsica believing Napoleon had grown up poor within limiting confines.  At twenty-six, how could he have dared to whisk an army across the snowcapped Alps? How could anyone with few worldly experiences have sailed off blithely to conquer Egypt? I wondered, as so many have, how this island boy of narrow prospects […]

Ajaccio’s cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin Mary and built in 1593, is steps from the Bonaparte house.  Tradition says it was here on August 15, 1769, Letizia Bonaparte felt sudden labor pains and rushed home, giving birth to Napoleon on a first floor sofa before she could reach her upstairs bedroom.  The church hasn’t changed […]

The Bonaparte’s country house in Milelli is less famous than the Ajaccio residence but to me more telling.  Located in the hills above  Ajaccio, it sits among rich olive trees, many old enough for Napoleon to have known them.  Here, the family came in the summer months, fleeing the heat and mosquitoes of the coastline.  […]