Books: No Hero

NAPOLEON IN HIS TIME (440 pp.)—

Jean Savant—Thomas Nelson & Sons ($6.50).

To see Napoleon as he really was, French Historian Jean Savant went on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet. He rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations...

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