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Napoleon’s upbringing imbued him with a reverence for social hierarchy, law and order, and a strong belief in reward for merit and courage, but also a dislike of politicians, lawyers, journalists and Britain.
At first she wasn’t attracted to his slightly yellow complexion, lank hair and unkempt look, nor presumably to his scabies,
That pleasure was denied him, for in June 1800 a twenty-four-year-old student named Soliman stabbed him to death. (Soliman was executed with a pike driven into his rectum up to his breast.)77
Grassini complained that Napoleon’s ‘caresses were on the furtive side’, and often left her unsatisfied, and in this she wasn’t alone. He never took time over his lovemaking, once reporting to an aide, ‘The matter was over in three minutes.’56
Under pressure from France, the British attorney-general, Spencer Perceval, finally decided that Peltier – a strange man who charged people a shilling each to watch him behead geese and ducks in his garden on a miniature guillotine made of walnut
Although Napoleon was quite content to let the Russians hibernate through the winter, Ney was desperately
his valet Grégoire recalled that he ‘didn’t hold his gun properly on his shoulder, and as he asked for it to be tightly loaded, his arm was always black after he’d fired a shot’.21 He once took seven shots to kill a cornered stag.)
When told that a local priest had died of shock at his approach, Napoleon had him buried with full military honours. The priest may have been overcome by the official declaration by the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church that Napoleon was in fact the Anti-Christ from the Book of Revelation.
(This might have been a reference to a return of the haemorrhoids which had been cured with leeches more than five years before.89) During the battle he stayed fairly sedentary at the Shevardino Redoubt
No sooner had the French entered Moscow and begun to ransack it, therefore, than they had to try to save it from being razed by its own inhabitants. With no knowledge of its geography and no fire-fighting equipment, they were unequal to the task. They shot around four hundred arsonists, but 6,500 of the 9,000 major buildings in the city were either burned down or ruined.14 Many of his soldiers, Napoleon remembered, died while ‘endeavouring to pillage in the midst of the flames’.15 When they cleaned up the city after the French had left, Muscovites found the charred remains of nearly 12,000
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On September 18, Napoleon distributed 50,000 plundered rubles to Muscovites who had lost their houses and he visited an orphanage, dispelling the widespread rumour that he was going to eat its inhabitants.
Only those openly denouncing Napoleon were liable to arrest, and even this mild crackdown was carried out in a classically French eighteenth-century manner. When the royalist Charles de Rivière ‘proclaimed his hopes a little too spitefully and prematurely’, he was sent to La Force prison, but was later released when a friend won his freedom in a game of billiards against Savary.
He now wrote to Bessières’ widow saying: ‘The loss for you and your children is no doubt immense, but mine is even more so. The Duc d’Istrie died the most beautiful death and suffered not.
With the Emperor riding beside him, Desvaux was cut in half by a cannonball.
Junot’s judgement might have been affected by the syphilis that was to drive him insane. At a ball at Ragusa the following year, he arrived stark naked except for his epaulettes, gloves, dancing shoes, orders and decorations (D’Abrantès, At the Court p. 21). He died in July 1813 as a result of gangrene setting into injuries sustained when jumping from a second-floor window under the impression that he could fly. (The surprise was that he could fit through, as he had taken to eating three hundred oysters a day.) (Strathearn, Napoleon in Egypt p. 422)
