Croix's Geographie and wrote in his notebook 'St Helena, small island'.
He was at one time totally absorbed in John Barrow's History of England
and made a hundred pages of manuscript notes on it. Some critics of
Napoleon say that he read too many second-rate authors, who simply put
the reader through a series of paradoxical hoops in the eighteenth-century
manner and produced a warped view of the world and historical events.
But we should remember that he was also reading Montesquieu,
Corneille, Plutarch, Adam Smith and other classics at the same time, so
this thesis cannot be pushed too far.
A more interesting study is the use to which Napoleon put his
omnivorous reading in his own writings. His early short story, Le Masque
Prophete, derives heavily from Marigny's history of the Arabs, and the
ghost story, Le Comte d'Essex, set in England in 168 3 , relies wholly on
Barrow's history. Another piece of fiction, inspired by his research for the
projected history of Corsica, and containing a very strong subtext of
support for the island's 'code of honour', was the romantic horror story
he began to write in 1789 entitled Nouvelle Corse. Ostensibly a fantasy of
utopia on a desert island, it is actually a grand guignol catalogue of murder
and atrocity, where Frenchmen are slaughtered in droves because of an
oath of vendetta. The story ends after eight pages, leaving critics to
wonder how Napoleon could possibly have topped his opening which, in
its absurdity, reminds one of the Goldwynism: Start with an earthquake
and build up to a climax.
In many ways Napoleon's non-fictional output is even odder. The
Lettres a Buttafuoco, written on 23 January 1791, reveal him as, at this
stage of his life, a very unsubtle propagandist: he simply accuses the
Corsican-born field marshal of treason and then produces a feeble version
of Cicero or Demosthenes in full flight.
0 Lameth! 0 Robespierre! 0 Petion! 0 Volney! 0 Mirabeau! 0
Barnave! 0 Bailly! 0 Lafayette! This is the man who dares to sit beside
you! Drenched in the blood of his brothers, tainted with every sort of
crime, he dares to call himself the representative of the nation- he who
sold it.Paoli, whether through annoyance at the 'over the top' style or because
Napoleon had mentioned representatives who sat on the left wing of the
assembly, wrote curtly to Joseph: 'I have received your brother's
pamphlet. It would have been more impressive if it had said less and been
less partisan.'
But 1791 saw a more important work, for the Academy of Lyons