Napoleon of the People, by Honore de Balzac

Project Gutenberg's The Napoleon of the People, by Honore de Balzac This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

Title: The Napoleon of the People

Author: Honore de Balzac

Translator: Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell

Release Date: October 16, 2005 [EBook #7958]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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

Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE

HONORE DE BALZAC

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.

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 de

next >