‘The apocryphal historians multiply,’ Napoleon wrote in 1807. ‘There is such a vast difference between one book and another on the same subject written in different epochs . . . that he who would seek sound knowledge and is suddenly placed in a vast historical library finds himself thrown into a veritable labyrinth.’ With over fifteen hundred people having recorded their memories of Napoleon in some form or another, that labyrinth is not always easy to navigate. Napoleon has been quoted and misquoted, lionized and pilloried, and his aphorisms plucked at random like passages from Machiavelli’s
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