NB – Archival notes…
Napoleon’s Marshals – Ed. Chandler
XLV – Boney: ‘Death is nothing, but to live defeated is to die everyday’. Perhaps one of the many reasons so many are fascinated with all things Boney is the contrast between his imposition of his will on the world, and our/their own abject submission to the compromises of life!?
XLIX – NB (Nap Bon) ‘in his earlier years was a supreme realist as well as an egotistical opportunist’.
NB – ‘It is with baubles that men are lead’. Sadly so often true!
NB – ‘If I wanted a man enough I would kiss his arse’!
LVIII – Augereau on NB: ‘sacrificed millions … to his cruel ambition’. Bernadotte: ‘that rogue, that scourge of the world who must be killed’!
Stendhal: ‘posterity will never appreciate what dull Jesuits those heroes of N’s bulletins really were’!
LIX – Excellent Van Loon quote re Boney’s charm (whole paragraph is worth quoting), but this’ll do for a pithy extract: ‘N was the greatest of actors and the whole European continent was his stage’. The single para from which this is extracted is arguably a better and more honest judgement on NB (inc. ‘I am telling you that the Emperor Napoleon was a most contemptible person’) than Paul Johnson’s entire windy diatribe.