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/… (more)

"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?… (more)

The Description de l'Egypte is a reproduction of the Napoleonic Egyptian Expedition's work. The book consists only of plates (with a very brief 3 page introduction) most of which are in black and white although a few are in colour. It contains sections on antiquities, contemporary Egypt (at the time of the expedition), as well as sections on flora, fauna and mineralogy.

There is no commentary on the plates and they are presented without any explanation of their ordering. This can be disorienting at first but one quickly comes to realize that, for each location, plates describing general details come first and are followed by plates with progressively greater detail. For example, a description of the Isle de Philae begins with a map showing its location, a more detailed map of the island, then several views of the island from different angles and then architectural drawings of the temples on the island. It ends with details of the temple carvings and hieroglyphics.

This book serves as a magnificent addendum to almost any Egyptian history text, providing great depth and detail of illustration of most of the major sites in Egypt. Even illustrated texts (ie. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt) do not approach the same level of visual detail as the Description.

There are two quibbles about the book's format that lead me to give the book 4 stars instead of 5. The first is that the book is too small. It is a paperback with 1008 pages, and not a very large paperback at that. This book would have been truly great (albeit much more expensive) if it had been a full-size hardcover. The second detail is that the plate captions are untranslated. This may be a concern to you if you do not speak French.

Overall, I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Egyptian history or archeology. It might also be an interesting tool for those interested in architecture or design, given its attention to fine details of early Egyptian constructions.… (more)