Fontainebleau! Home to French kings for eight centuries, Napoleon spent vast sums to restore it, initially to house the pope whom he’d coerced into attending his 1804 coronation (only to crown himself rather than allowing the pope to do it). Years later, Emperor Napoleon imprisoned that same pope within its walls for eighteen months until […]
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In 1779, nine-year-old Napoleon arrived at military school in Brienne. Barely speaking French in a heavy Corsican accent, he faced five years of isolation, austerity and mockery. Yet, despite his ardent Corsican nationalism, it was here he became a Frenchman. He also became an impassioned reader of history, devouring Plutarch’s Lives and demanding access to
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Yesterday was our first day in Paris. After settling into our apartment on Rue Bonaparte a few blocks from the Seine, we walked to Les Invalides, Napoleon I’s burial site. During the mile-long walk, I was reminded that the truism about Parisians having style is remarkably true. Trim women gracefully navigate cobblestones on spiked heels,
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
He is the epitome of France, yet he didn’t speak French until he was nine. The second son of minor, impoverished Corsican nobility, he attended military school on the French king’s sou. By age thirty, he had supplanted that monarch as France’s ruler. He faced battle fearlessly but could be petulant over a slight head
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