Napoleon: A Biography

to spy on Carlo when he was drinking and gambling in the Ajaccio
saloons. There were also more sinister suspicions about Letizia and
Marbeuf that he dared not express consciously. But it is important to be
clear that Napoleon's ambivalence about his mother was part of a general
obsession with Letizia, and we would therefore be justified in adding
'mother fixation' to the other 'complexes' already noted.
All human beings struggle in vain against the determinism of the
parental legacy, both biological and psychological. The curious paradox
of being a charismatic workaholic, which was the character of the adult
Napoleon, surely results from the very different and centrifugal qualities
of his two ill-matched parents. From Carlo he would appear to have
derived the histrionic and magnetic qualities, the self-dramatization and
the ability to win men; from Letizia came the self-discipline and the
fanatical devotion to work. It was the Letizia-derived qualities that would
be most valuable to him during his virtual orphancy at Brienne.