Napoleão Bonaparte

During a hard-fought game of Trivial Pursuit the other day, I discovered that Napoleon Bonaparte had written a romantic novel. Obviously, I decided that I had to get my hands on this as soon as possible. I had visions of balls and the language of fans, of brooding heroes, comic misunderstandings and smart-tongued heroines. This was foolish, I admit. In fact, this isn’t a novel so much as a short story, barely more than twenty pages long. It’s also very clearly Romantic rather than romantic. And Napoleon may have been a great general, but he wasn’t all that good as a novelist. Personally, I don’t believe this would have received any critical attention whatsoever were it not for the identity of its author; but that is interesting enough to warrant a bit of discussion...

For the rest of the review, please see my blog:
https://theidlewoman.net/2018/02/21/clisson-and-eugenie-napoleon-bonaparte/… (meer)

"Dear Lt. Buonaparte,
I note that you do have a great love of our beautiful tongue, especially for one raised in an area where a proper education in writing French must have been hard to come by. You efforts to create pleasing tales, I hope, brought to a greater understanding and respect for the giants of our literary past. However, I regret that the material submitted to our press do not meet with our present projected line of books for the Christmas season of 1787. Perhaps another printer will find your stories more to their tastes.
Regretfully, Etienne Laroche."
After reading Mr. Frayling's work my mind came up with the above possible rejection letter from a fictitious printer. It's the least I could do, since it must have taken a great deal of work on Mr. Frayling's part to come up with Napoleon's juvenilia, and get a publisher to go for it. C.S. Forester remarked that the average publisher has to have at least one book on Napoleon for the Christmas line every year. This could well have been one of them. Still, it was fun to read. I wonder if anyone ever quotes from these when doing interior dialogue for Napoleon in a novel?… (meer)