Margaret’s Blog

After seeing the photo of me riding an elephant, one of this blog’s readers asked if Napoleon had ridden a camel during his Egyptian Campaign (1798). Yes, Melanie! Here’s a photo I took of a small bronze statue of the Man himself on camelback. It’s displayed in the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio, Corsica, Napoleon’s hometown. […]

I’m thrilled to announce that my Napoleon novel won the Best Fiction Award at the San Francisco Writers Conference. I’d submitted the first twenty-five pages of my manuscript several weeks ago and knew it had placed as a top ten finalist. It was a wonderful surprise to have it chosen as winner. This past weekend […]

In November, 2012, I took a break from writing about Napoleon to travel in Southeast Asia, visiting Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.  It was primarily a bicycling trip, and, I assure you, my equipment was higher quality than what you see above in the photo snapped in the picturesque fields of Vietnam. Here’s another method […]

This portrait of Napoleon, painted in 1812 before the Emperor’s departure on the disastrous Russian expedition, is one of my favorites. The Duke of Hamilton, who, as a Stuart, considered himself the rightful heir to the Scottish throne, commissioned Jacques-Louis David to paint it. It hangs now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, […]

As far back as Corsican records go, Napoleon’s family signed their name “Bonaparte.” In 1759, Napoleon’s father, Carlo, in his quest to establish hereditary links to Tuscan nobility, changed to the Italian “Buonoparte” form. Ten years later, his second son, Napoleon, was born under that surname. Because Carlo had succeeded in establishing the family’s noble […]

As I wrote in an earlier post, the Corsican assembly, in 1793, voted unanimously “to inflict on the individuals making up [the family] Bonaparte an eternal brand that renders their name and their memory detestable to [all Corsican] patriots.” Six years later, however, during a stopover on Napoleon’s return from the Egyptian campaign, the Corsicans […]

On August 15, 1769, in Ajaccio, Corsica, the Archdeacon Lucien Buonaparte celebrated the festival of the Virgin Mary, the town’s patron saint.  Young Letizia Buonaparte, interrupting her devotions, hurried home to give birth to her second son. The boy was named Napoleon after an uncle who had died several months earlier while fighting in vain […]

In June 1812, Emperor Napoleon marched from Paris with one of the greatest armies ever raised.  By the end of the year, what started out as 600,000 troops had dwindled to the mere 25,000 who made it home alive. One can blame disease, a severe winter, and the Russian scorched earth policy for hundreds of […]

The recent death of the Galapagos Islands’ iconic tortoise, Lonesome George, sent me scrambling for my copy of The Voyage of the HMS Beagle. Sure enough, Charles Darwin, who made the Galapagos famous, had also stopped at St Helena Island. He arrived there on July 8, 1836, five and half years into his six-year trip […]

Napoleon’s first wife Josephine was born Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie in Martinique on June 23, 1763. If you could ask her, however, she’d probably lie and tell you her birth year was 1767, which was what she wrote on her marriage documents. Napoleon also lied on those documents, saying he, too, had […]