Napoleon read Corneille, Racine and Voltaire with evident pleasure. His favourite poet was Ossian, whose bardic tales of ancient Gaelic conquest thrilled him with accounts of heroism among misty moors and epic battles on stormy seas. He took the Ossian poem Fingal on his campaigns, commissioned several Ossianic paintings, and was so impressed with the opera Ossian by Jean-François Le Sueur, with its twelve orchestral harps, that he made the composer a chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur at the premiere in 1804.
