NAPOLEON'S LETTERS (312 pp.)—Translated and Edited by J. M. Thompson—Everyman's Library ($1.65).
Habitually at around 2 a.m., Dictator Napoleon Bonaparte strode into his writing room and assaulted his correspondence. He answered immediately a few important letters, laid others aside for further consideration, hurled the remainder on the floor. At 4 a.m. he summoned his secretary, who found the great man impatiently striding the floor in a white dressing gown, a handkerchief bound round his head.
"Write!" snapped the Emperor, and instantly a flood of words poured from the imperial mouth—natural, conversational words spoken with such intimate intensity as to give the illusion that the recipients of the letters were entering the room one by one, hearing the Emperor's orders with their own ears, and then passing from the scene like ghosts. The toiling secretary, scribbling like mad in a desperate shorthand, never dared to interrupt the one-man show, which ended only when the Emperor abruptly shot from the room, took an hour's nap. and ultimately returned with "an overfilled goose-quill" to inscribe a blotty "N" at the base of each transcribed letter.
Napoleon wrote between 50,000 and 70,000 letters in this way during the 15 years of his dictatorship. Thirty-nine years after Waterloo, Napoleon III (youngest son of the first Emperor's brother, Louis Bonaparte) ordered "official" (i.e., edited and censored) publication of the correspondence—and landed his chosen editors with a nagging headache. Far from illustrating "the grand personality" of "our august predecessor," the letters displayed Napoleon's true personality with embarrassing frankness. Whole sections of them had to be omitted as "illegible," so that the imperial legend should not be tarnished by evidence of ruthless dishonesty.
Man of All Trades. The 300 unedited letters in the Everyman collection, the first new edition in two decades, are the latest attempt to distill "a potent bottle" out of the "great lake of correspondence." They show a mind that always went straight to the point without swerving a hair's breadth and never doubted that it was wise enough to teach law to lawyers, science to scientists, and religion to Popes. Most of the letters have a single idea at the back of them—to impress on the recipients the notion that they are living in an age dominated by a "new spirit"—Napoleon himself. Anything, no matter how trifling, that weakens this impression is automatically condemned; anything that strengthens it, no matter how falsely, is automatically encouraged.
"Your love affair [with Mme. de Visconti] has lasted too long," runs a directive to Marshal Berthier. "I have a right to expect that a man . . . whom posterity will always picture at my side, shall no longer abandon himself . . . I want you to get married . . . If you don't, I will never see you again." (Berthier did take a wife, but not Mme. de Visconti.)