Clisson And Eug Nie

The tragic story of Clisson and Eugenie reveals one of history's great leaders to also be an accomplished writer of fiction.Written in an eloquently Romantic style true to its period, the story offers the reader a fascinating insight into how the young Napoleon viewed love, women and military life.

A romantic novella from the pen of the great Napoleon Bonaparte

“Rodenberg inventively uses Bonaparte’s own unfinished novel to tell the story of the despot’s rise to power, which she juxtaposes against the story of his last love affair. Told creatively and with excellent research!” —Stephanie Dray, New York Times and USA Today best-selling author of America's First Daughter and The Women of Chateau Lafayette “Beautiful and poignant.” —Allison Pataki, New York Times best-selling author of The Queen’s Fortune With its delightful adaptation of Napoleon Bonaparte’s real attempt to write romantic fiction, Finding Napoleon: A Novel offers a fresh take on Europe’s most powerful man after he’s lost everything—except his last love. A forgotten woman of history—the audacious Countess Albine—helps narrate their tale of intrigue, desire, and betrayal. After the defeated Emperor Napoleon goes into exile on tiny St. Helena Island in the remote South Atlantic, he and his lover, Albine de Montholon, plot to escape and rescue his young son. Banding together enslaved Africans, British sympathizers, a Jewish merchant, a Corsican rogue, and French followers, they confront British opposition—as well as treachery within their own ranks—with sometimes subtle, sometimes bold, but always desperate action. Amid his passions and intrigues, Napoleon finishes his real novel Clisson that he started writing as a young man. Now it's a father's message to the young son whom his enemies took from him, but how can they get it to the boy? When Napoleon and Albine break faith with one another, ambition and Albine’s husband threaten their reconciliation. To succeed, Napoleon must learn whom to trust. To survive, Albine must decide whom to betray. This elegant, richly researched novel reveals the Napoleon history conceals and the Countess Albine history has forgotten.

Not that all Napoleons letters, or even many of them, are of a selfrevealing kind. In youth he had few confidants in middle age he had little to confide. la the stress of business and war he soon shed the idealism of the patriot, the fatalism of the f evolutionary, and the romanticism of the lover. Any sense he may once have had of the beauty, the pathos, or even the humour of life was coarsened by flattery and success. He can still declare, exhort, abuse, persuade, even charm but always in the interest of a policy, and to gain an end. He is wise, clearsighted, eloquent, heroic but hardly ever a human being in repose. Nevertheless, Napo leons letters remain, beyond anything written about him, or anything else he wrote or said about himself, by far his finest portrait. When he was a young man, Napoleon wrote in the rapid and already confused hand of the relatively rare letters signed Buonaparte or Bonaparte. With growing age and work, his handwriting became so slovenly as to be wellnigh illegible whilst his signature shortened from Napoleon to Napol., Nap., Np., and N. Though he still wrote some private letters, and the more important military and diplomatic despatches, he habitually employed secretaries, and carried on the bulk of his correspondence by dictation. Napoleon had three principal secretaries Bourrienne 1797-1802, Meneval 1802-13, and Fain 1806-14. All of them wrote Memoirs, and there is no lack of evidence as to how their work was done. In a rather unkind conversation at St. Helena, Napoleon said that Bourrienne wrote a good hand, and was active, tireless, and patriotic, but that he was a gambler, whose face lit up when his master dictated any thing dealing with big figures: he was in fact dismissed for becoming involved in financial speculation. His work was done partly at the Luxembourg, and partly at the Tuileries. In his Memoirs he describes Napoleons appear ance, dress, and habits in minute detail. From breakfast at 10 to dinner at 5 every hour was taken up with reading petitions, correcting letters, giving interviews, or attending meetings.

While in exile on St Helena, Napoleon dictated a commentary on the wars of Julius Caesar, later published in 1836. In each chapter he summarized the events of one campaign, then added comments from the standpoint of his own military knowledge. Over the nearly two millennia between Caesar and Napoleon some aspects of warfare had changed, notably the introduction of firearms. But much remained the same: the rate of movement of armies (at the foot pace of horse or man); human muscle power as the main source of energy for construction work; some military techniques, notably bridge construction; as well as the actual territory fought over by Caesar and later by Napoleon. Napoleons commentary thus provides a fascinating and highly authoritative insight into Caesars wars, as well as providing a window into Napoleons own thinking and attitudes. Napoleon in places detects mistakes on the part of Caesar and his enemies, and says what they should have done differently. Remarkably, this is thought to be the first full English translation of Napoleon's work.Napoleon Bonaparte was born to an obscure Corsican family but rose through the ranks of the French army to become Emperor of France, conqueror of most of Europe and acknowledged military genius. He wrote this book while in exile on St Helena.The translator. RA Maguire, is a former civil engineer with a long-standing interest in military and ancient history.

Set on the rugged, mountainous west coast of Mallorca, this taut, sultry, brilliantly paced novel is an urgent meditation on female desire, the vicissitudes of marriage and the allure of youth. Taking place over the course of one week, The Lemon Grove lands in the heat of Deia, a village on an island off the southeast coast of Spain. Jenn and Greg are on their annual holiday to enjoy languorous, close afternoons by the pool, and relaxed dinners overlooking the rocks. But the equilibrium is upset by the arrival of their teenage daughter, Emma, and her boyfriend, Nathan. Jenn, in her early forties, loves her (older) husband and her (step)daughter and is content with her life, she thinks. But when this beautiful, reckless young man comes into her world, she is caught by a sexual compulsion that she's seldom felt before. As the lines hotly blur between attraction, desire and obsession, Jenn’s world is thrown into tumult--by Nathan's side, she could be young and carefree once again, and at this stage in her life, the promise of youth is every bit as seductive as the promise of passion. Jenn struggles between the conflicting pulls of resistance and release, and the events of the next few days have the potential to put lives in jeopardy as the players carry out their roles in this unstoppably sexy and unputdownable novel from a brilliant observer of the human condition.

A biography that examines the extraordinary evolution of Napoleon's character. During his formative years his identity was constantly shifting, his character ambiguous and his intentions often ill-defined.