The Project Gutenberg EBook of Folk-Tales of Napoleon
by Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof

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Title: Folk-Tales of Napoleon
The Napoleon of the People; Napoleonder

Author: Honore de Balzac and Alexander Amphiteatrof

Release Date: February 25, 2004 [EBook #11278]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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FOLK-TALES OF NAPOLEON

NAPOLEONDER
From the Russian

THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE
From the French of Honore de Balzac

Translated With Introduction By
GEORGE KENNAN

1902

CONTENTS

NAPOLEONDER
THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE

INTRODUCTION

Most of the literature that has its origin in the life and career of a
great man may be grouped and classified under two heads: history and
biography. The part that relates to the man's actions, and to the
influence that such actions have had in shaping the destinies of peoples
and states, belongs in the one class; while the part that derives its
interest mainly from the man's personality, and deals chiefly with the
mental and moral characteristics of which his actions were the outcome,
goes properly into the other. The value of the literature included in
these two classes depends almost wholly upon truth; that is, upon the
precise correspondence of the statements made with the real facts of the
man's life and career. History is worse than useless if it does not
accurately chronicle and describe events; and biography is valueless and
misleading if it does not truly set forth individual character.

There is, however, a kind of great-man literature in which truth is
comparatively unimportant, and that is the literature of popular legend
and tradition. Whether it purports to be historical or biographical, or
both, it derives its interest and value from the light that it throws
upon the temperament and character of the people who originate it,
rather than from the amount of truth contained in the statements that
it makes about the man.

The folk-tales of Napoleon Bonaparte herewith presented, if judged from
the viewpoint of th