Non-Fiction

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The story.* The Alps, if they could, would have snickered in 1796 at a shaggy-haired, large-skulled, short youth of 27 with a tatterdemalion army at his back. He was part failure, part lover, part dangerous. . . .

A Corsican, he had been sent to France to a military school because his parents were too poor to keep him at home. He brooded—shy, taciturn, lonely—while scions of the frivolous French nobility laughed at him. He wrote absurd fiction; he contemplated suicide. "Everything goes awry,"...

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