Project Gutenberg's The Napoleon of the People, by Honore de Balzac

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Title: The Napoleon of the People

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Katharine Prescott Wormeley

Release Date: Release Date: April, 2005 [EBook #7958]
Posting Date: March 7, 2010

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE ***

Produced by John Bickers, and Dagny

THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE

By Honore De Balzac

Translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell.

PREPARER'S NOTE

The Napoleon of the People was originally published in Le Medicin de
Campagne (The Country Doctor). It is a story told to a group of peasants
by the character of Goguelat, an ex-soldier who served under Napoleon in
an infantry regiment. It was later included in Folk-tales of Napoleon:
Napoleonder from the Russian, a collection of stories by various
authors. This translation is by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell.

THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE

Napoleon, you see, my friends, was born in Corsica, which is a French
island warmed by the Italian sun; it is like a furnace there, everything
is scorched up, and they keep on killing each other from father to son
for generations all about nothing at all--'tis a notion they have. To
begin at the beginning, there was something extraordinary about the
thing from the first; it occurred to his mother, who was the handsomest
woman of her time, and a shrewd soul, to dedicate him to God, so that he
should escape all the dangers of infancy and of his after life; for she
had dreamed that the world was on fire on the day he was born. It was
a prophecy! So she asked God to protect him, on condition that Napoleon
should re-establish His holy religion, which had been thrown to the
ground just then. That was the agreement; we shall see what came of it.

Now, do you follow me carefully, and tell me whether what you are about
to hear is natural.

It is certain sure that only a man who had had imagination enough to
make a mysterious compact would be capable of going further than anybody
else, and of passing through volleys of grape-shot and showers of
bullets which carried us off lik