Napoleon I

Reading notes

• Poetry and Prose §36 Napoleon I

  Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor of the French; the vignette imagines him at his most cynically charming, angling for a mistress to appear without her husband.

• The Name-Day Party §83 Bonaparte

  Uncle Nikolai Nikolaich accuses Pyotr Dmitrich of 'playing at being some sort of Bonaparte' -- invoking Napoleon as the era's stock figure for grandiose, self-important posturing rather than any real comparison of stature.

• The Princess §41 you look at all people the way Napoleon did, as meat for cannon

  "Cannon fodder" (chair à canon) was already proverbially associated with Napoleon's willingness to spend soldiers' lives for strategic gain; the doctor's twist is that Napoleon at least had an idea he was spending them for, while the princess, in his account, discards people out of simple aversion, with no larger purpose at all.

• An Unpleasant Business §20 a la Napoleon

  The imagined little beard "a la Napoleon" refers to the imperial-style pointed goatee associated with Napoleon III (himself echoing his uncle Napoleon I's iconography), a fashionable facial-hair style through much of the nineteenth century; combined with the waxed soldierly mustache, it renders Boiseau in Zhirkov's imagination as a stock comic French type rather than an individual.

• To A. S. Suvorin, 26 October 1891. Moscow. §7 Napoleon

  Chekhov's complaint is narrowly aimed: he does not fault Tolstoy's novel in general but singles out its Napoleon scenes as strained, full of "tricks" meant to prove the historical Napoleon stupider than he actually was -- a judgment about authorial special pleading, not about Napoleon himself.

• Forgotten!! §28 Bonaparte

  Napoleon Bonaparte, invoked here only as a schoolboy nickname pinned on the family's French violin tutor, who indignantly insists he is no such thing.