venture was ill-starred. He thought comets worked in pre-established
harmony with terrestrial events.
Brought up on the Corsican notion of the 'evil eye', Napoleon thought
that certain people were irremediably doomed to bad luck and
communicated this lack of fortune to those around them. Hence the
famous question he always asked of his generals: is he lucky? One of the
reasons he stayed married to Josephine long after she had outlived her
usefulness and attraction was that he thought she brought him good luck.
There are numerous stories linking Josephine with her husband's
superstitions. During the Italian campaign of 1796----97 he always wore a
miniature of her; when it fell and broke, he was devastated and told
Marmont (incidentally, later to be the classic 'unlucky' general) this
meant his wife was either ill or unfaithful. On another occasion during a
row with Lucien he accidentally knocked Josephine's portrait off the
table, smashing the glass; he at once turned pale with superstitious dread.
Yet perhaps the most bizarre aspect of Napoleon's abiding belief in the
paranormal or supernatural is the attachment he had to two 'familiars',
one ghostly, the other sidereal. Many people claim to believe in a lucky
star but Napoleon did so literally and often searched for his favourite dot
of light in the night sky. When the Concordat began to unravel and he
treated Pius VII badly, his uncle, Cardinal Fesch, came to protest.
Napoleon asked him to step outside and look up at the sky. 'Do you see
anything?' he asked. 'No,' said Fesch. 'In that case, learn when to shut
up. I myself see my star; it is that which guides me. Don't pit your feeble
and incomplete faculties against my superior organism.'
But even the lucky star pales alongside the familiar spirit or phantom
he called the 'Little Red Man'. According to legend, Napoleon made a
ten-year pact with a genie just before the Battle of the Pyramids, and the
agreement was renewed in 1809. The spirit promised to advise and
protect Napoleon provided he ushered in the Brotherhood of Man and
the Universal Republic; if Napoleon reneged, the Red Man was to give
him three formal warnings before abandoning him to his enemies. The
legend says that the Red Man appeared at the time of his coronation in
1804, in Moscow in 1812 and at Fontainebleau in April 1814; in other
versions of the legend the spectre advised him against invading Russia
and appeared on the eve of Waterloo. It is not unknown for individuals
under great stress to, as it were, exteriorize aspects of their own
unconscious, as Carl Jung did with his familiar Philemon, and it is not
beyond the bounds of the possible that Napoleon conversed with his Red
Man just as Jung did with Philemon. The predisposition to believe in
such apparitions was quintessentially Corsican; psychologically, of course,
marcin
(Marcin)
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