# ethan Says:

I am Napoleon’s #1 fan! I am 7. I am looking forward to future podcasts. This is very interesting. You should watch my review of “Essential Visual History of the World” for the Storytubes contest. (I had to cut it down to only 2 minutes, though.)
if you like it you can vote for me May 26-June 1 at this site:
http://www.storytubes.info/
If I win I get to give $1000 worth of books to my library. Maybe then other kids can learn about the REAL Napoleon.

His video is great! I think my son Hunter, who is also 7, came home from school last week with two book from the school library - both about Napoleon. I think I should introduce him to Ethan!

Let’s all vote for Ethan on May 26 and help him win some books!

A love letter from Napoleon to his future wife, Josephine, has fetched some £276,000 ($556,000; 409,000 euros) at an auction in London.

In the letter - one of only three known to have been sent to Josephine by the French emperor before their marriage - he apologises after a furious row.

The early love letter was written after a heated argument.

“I send you three kisses - one on your heart, one on your mouth and one on your eyes,” Napoleon wrote.

Read the full story here!

History buffs from Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Holland and elsewhere said the Waterloo commemoration is one of the most important events on their calendars. The actual anniversary of the battle was Monday but the event was on the weekend.

The sword was carried by Napoleon — who was not yet emperor — into the battle of Marengo in June 1800, when he launched a surprise attack to push the Austrian army from Italy and seal France’s victory, sold Sunday for more than $6.4 million, an auction house said.

Read the full details here.

If you happen to be in Paris, a solemn mass will be celebrated in his memory and the soldiers of the Grande Armée at Les Invalides at 11am. Details here. If you go, please write us a report. Amongst those present will be S.A.I. the Princess Napoléon, General H. Gobilliard, governor of Les Invalides and Brigadier General R. Bresse, director of the Musée de l’Armée.

In other Napoleon related news today:

There is a new book out on Wellington that sounds interesting. According to this review of “Dancing into Battle: A Social History of the Battle of Waterloo” (Nick Foulkes), “the handsome Wellington spent most of his day dallying with well-born young ladies and the young wives of titled Englishmen, pleasuring them in a carriage screened by the trees of Brussels’s still-lovely park. Almost every evening he gave an expensive ball. He made a point of attending the ball given by the Duchess of Richmond on the eve of the battle, but it was a mixed bag of an evening, as officers kept disappearing to join their regiments. In the days before Waterloo, Wellington forestalled a general tendency to panic by always appearing incredibly nonchalant, not to say cool. His insouciance, a word thoroughly overworked by author Foulkes, was evidently worth at least another 50,000 men.”

The British army wasn’t a meritocracy like the French:
“With the exception of the artillery, all the officers in Wellington’s army had purchased their expensive commissions. Their promotion and higher pay depended in great part on casualties among the more senior ranks.”

The book also describes how the battle changed Wellington, who dropped his cool exterior afterwards. “The victorious Wellington was a changed man. Though used to battle, the carnage at Waterloo appalled him. The mask of insouciance was dropped. With it too went the worship of glory, at least for a long moment.”

There is also a review from the Tribeca Film Festival on the new film “Napoleon and Me”.

“Virzi’s film, which is a mixture of soft comedy and emotional soapboxing about ideals like freedom and honor, focuses on a brief period at the end of the Napoleonic Wars when the vanquished French emperor was sent into exile on the tiny Italian island of Elba.

“If this were Variety, I would point out that pic’s best chance to do well with auds is the inclusion of Monica Bellucci in a prominent role as a baroness floozy who is anxious over turning 40 and aggressively courts 20-something men like Martino who will remind her of how beautiful she is.”

“As Napoleon, French acting legend Daniel Auteuil is more than credible, walking a foot shorter but somehow more imposing than the bodyguards and hangers-on who follow his every step around the island. Auteuil gives a careful, ambitious performance, but the screenplay to let that performance fly is not really in place.”

Finally, Empress Josephine at the Hermitage:

“The famous Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg will open on the 28th of June 2007 a fascinating exhibition, presenting the rich collection assembled by the Empress Josephine at her chateau Malmaison. Many of the works which she cherished - some of those have been chosen for the Hermitage exhibition - were actually gifts from Napoleon, who had acquired them during his military campaigns in Europe. After the Empress’ death, the bulk of the collection, mainly paintings and sculptures, was bought by Tsar Alexander I and later brought to St Petersburg, where it was installed in the Winter Palace.”

Elba island, 1814. Martino is a young teacher, idealist and strongly anti-Napoleonic, in love with the beautiful and noble Baroness Emily. The young man finds himself serving as librarian to the Great Emperor in exile whom he deeply hates yet soon begins recording Napoleon’s memoirs, getting to know and learning to value the man behind the myth. Among seductions and affairs, expectations and fears, he will craft a precise portrait that never less will not manage to hide a final, inevitable, disappointment.

Here’s a link to the trailer (in Italian).

Incredibly, Mr Napoleon is also 1,120th in line to the British throne, thanks to the marriage in 1807 between Jerome Bonaparte and German princess Katherine of Wurttemberg.

Imagine - a Napoleon on the throne of England. How hard could it be to make 1119 people disappear?

Here’s an interesting story:

At an exhibition in Paris’ Grand Palais entitled Les Trésors Engloutis D’Egypt aka The Sunken Treasures of Egypt, there was a meeting between two representatives of the former Imperial Houses of France and Persia: HIH Princess Napoleon Bonaparte and HIM Shahbanou Farah Pahlavi of Iran. The Former reigning Empress of Iran and the descendant of the French Emperor were the VIP visitors of this exhibition that opened on December 9th 2006.

I confess to not being entirely sure who HIH Princess Napoleon Bonaparte actually is. Judging by the photograph, I am guessing she is either the twin sister, ex-wife or current wife of Charles Napoleon Bonaparte, aka Napoleon VII. Can anyone clarify that?