The Linguist and the Emperor by Daniel Meyerson

Author:Daniel Meyerson
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780345472182
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2004-03-01T21:00:00+00:00

“IT IS EASIER to understand humanity in general than to understand a single human being,” La Rochefoucauld tells us—a maxim which perfectly applies to Napoleon. For the role General Bonaparte or Emperor Napoleon plays on the world stage is indeed much easier to understand than the demonic impulses and obsessions which thrust him onto that stage.

But if one truth about Napoleon the man is more striking than any other, it is this: History forms the air he breathes, the food he eats. Its examples, its ironies, its personalities form him. They are the medium through which he experiences reality.

He gazes at himself in the mirror and sees Caesar and Charlemagne and a hundred others. Even in defeat, he is Gustavus and Hannibal and Frederick Barbarossa. (“I appeal to you,” he writes to the British after Waterloo, “as Themistocles appealed to his enemies.”) He is Coriolanus and Alexander the Great not only on the battlefield, but even in the boudoir, even in affairs of the heart.

During the campaign in Egypt, Josephine is free of his oppressive presence and she no longer has to cancel assignations. (“Forgive me. I can’t come tonight. Bonaparte will be home.”) She abandons all caution and is seen everywhere with the charming Hippolyte Charles who knows how to tie his cravat so magnificently and whose jokes about Napoleon are repeated everywhere (like Napoleon, he is some eight years younger than Josephine).

But what she does not take into account is the entire Bonaparte clan. They hate her. His brothers and sisters and his mother have remained in France and are watching out for the family’s honor in true Italian style . . . though, finally, it is from a friend that he will learn of the scandal.

When he does, he weeps and rages. For a while, he is almost out of his mind with grief. He clutches Josephine’s sixteen-year-old son to him, whom he has made an aide-de-camp, ranting through the night to him about his beautiful, mercenary, sensual, faithless mother whose heavy rose perfume he always disliked and whose simplest gesture displayed more grace than that of any other woman he had ever known.

Cursing Josephine and her lover and love itself, he writes a despairing letter to his brother declaring that life no longer has meaning for him. “My passion for glory is gone. I am sick of humanity. I have no more reason to live. At twenty-nine years of age, I am worn out.” The letter is intercepted on the Mediterranean by the British and published in the London newspapers.

While it arouses spiteful laughter from one end of Europe to the other, it is impossible to read it without feeling his pain. It is as far from a “literary” letter as it is possible to be: the unpremeditated cri du coeur of a man who will never again be romantically vulnerable. Women will be told to be in his bed, undressed, by such and such an hour when he will either appear or not, depending on his mood.

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