was the consequence of a heart blockage, which might explain his
abnormally low pulse rate of forty a minute.
Another constant physical symptom which assailed Napoleon was a
skin disease, variously described as neurodermatitis or psoriasis. Napo
leon himself believed that this skin ailment was the result of handling an
infected ramrod at Toulon in 1793, but modern opinion inclines either to
venereal disease or psychosomatic causation. The blood on his face at
Brumaire, which so inflamed the troops, was not the consequence of an
attempted assassination but resulted from his own scratching at the
pimples on his face. His valet Constant reported that his master often
drew blood in this way. He also had a scar on his thigh from a wound
sustained at Toulon, at which he would pick and draw blood.
Put together with the nervous cough, which Napoleon tried to combat
with frequent hot baths, and the difficulty in passing water, Yvan
concluded (though he did not use modern phraseology) that his patient's
problems were largely psychosomatic. Modern psychoanalysts have seen
Napoleon as a man ill-suited for stress by reason of his sexual personality.
Adler made much of the fact that Napoleon masturbated before battle to
relieve stress. Fromm saw his nervous excitability as a sign of an
unconscious thirst for destruction. Reich associated the ritual 'bleedings'
of scars, scabs and pimples as the tension that resulted from the failure to
achieve proper orgasm, and linked it with the known problem of
ejaculatio praecox.
The almost pathological impatience manifested itself in a tendency to
calculate the immediate odds without taking into account the more
distant possible consequences, and in the demand he made for immediate
results without giving his lieutenants adequate resources to carry out his
will. The boredom was apparent at meetings of the Council of State when
the First Consul would often be lost in thought, often seeming to be
thinking aloud when he spoke. Secretive, trusting no one, disingenuous
in his correspondence and unable to admit the truth about certain
incidents even to himself, Napoleon's profound silences often scared
those around him, who feared to interrupt his reveries. Only Talleyrand
seemed similarly abstracted and when the two of them were together in
Council those of a historical turn of mind recalled the partnership of the
glacial Louis XI and the impassive Richelieu.
The intellectual in Napoleon was always at war with the artist manque.
He was once walking with Roederer through the state apartments of the
Tuileries. Roederer remarked that the palace was a gloomy place, for it
always reminded him of the sad fate of the Bourbons. Napoleon replied:
'Sad, yes -but so is glory.' This poetic insight- the kind of thing that
marcin
(Marcin)
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