Napoleon: A Biography

flattered her by suggesting she go to Rome to see Cardinal Pesch and be presented to the Pope, but his real motive was to get ri ...

effectively expelled from her life. Elisa and Caroline Bonaparte were classic examples of what C.G. Jung called 'power devils'. ...

Pauline, who always hated Josephine, rubbed her nose in her new­ found wealth by visiting her at St-Cloud wearing the entire Bor ...

echoed round St-Cloud. Josephine and the consular valets rushed upstairs to find Napoleon in the grip of an epileptic-like seizu ...

bedroom unannounced and sat on the bedside. After reading his morning's correspondence, he gave her a pinch and, getting no resp ...

met Marguerite George he tore off her veil and trampled it on the floor. He seldom said anything agreeable to women but was habi ...

He liked to strike people of both sexes, to slap them, pull their hair, pinch their ears and tweak their noses. Slapping servant ...

to feel that he alone counted. He had an amazing ability to sway other men to his purposes. The musicality of his voice as he ad ...

function of pure impatience, fr ustration and intolerance. Woe betide any servant who placed something on the right-hand side th ...

enemtes speak of pride, contempt for human beings, neurasthenia, nervous anxiety and indecision, and it is true that he had all ...

breakdowns among staff, particularly in the later imperial period. Yet there was never any rigid timetable. Sometimes he would l ...

venial sin of misrepresentation, and in any case speaks volumes for his intelligence and insight into human psychology. The more ...

was the consequence of a heart blockage, which might explain his abnormally low pulse rate of forty a minute. Another constant p ...

made Chateaubriand call him 'a poet in action' - is not so far in sensibility from his account of his own relationship to Fate: ...

entirely the victim of circumstances. He failed to see that the brilliance and originality of his mind was such that it could ne ...

that he was both rootless and classless. Neither a nobleman nor a plebeian, in his early days he faced both ways, being willing ...

venture was ill-starred. He thought comets worked in pre-established harmony with terrestrial events. Brought up on the Corsican ...

the tale of the Red Man points to a huge weight of guilt bearing down on Napoleon. The supersitition may possibly be connected w ...

'Rome complex' feeding other streams of the Napoleonic conscious and unconscious. Britain is now the new Carthage that must be d ...

CHAPTER FOURTEEN The second half of I803 saw Napoleon once again on his travels, after three Paris-bound years. On 25 June he be ...