Napoleon Bonaparte Character Analysis

It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress[.]

Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

“Will you kill people, Henri?”

I dropped down beside her. “Not people, Louise, just the enemy.”

“What is enemy?”

“Someone who’s not on your side.”

“What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we’re still alive, and say you’ve got the truth?”

“I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change. I want to remember that.”

I wrote about her or tried to. She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.

Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.

Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?

They called the Czar ‘the Little Father’, and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror for my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far.

You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.

And if you refuse?

If you felt for every man you murdered [. . .] madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.

If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once-loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

Future. Crossed Out.

That’s what war does.

“They’re all different.”

“What?”

“Snowflakes. Think of that.”

I did think of that and I fell in love with her.

What you risk reveals what you value.

Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?

Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.

I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.

They had notebooks with them mostly. His life-story, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.

I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.

Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.

My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.

The one is about you, the other about someone else.

It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress[.]

Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.

I’m telling you stories. Trust me.

“Will you kill people, Henri?”

I dropped down beside her. “Not people, Louise, just the enemy.”

“What is enemy?”

“Someone who’s not on your side.”

“What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we’re still alive, and say you’ve got the truth?”

“I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change. I want to remember that.”

I wrote about her or tried to. She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.

Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.

Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?

They called the Czar ‘the Little Father’, and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror for my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far.

You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.

And if you refuse?

If you felt for every man you murdered [. . .] madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.

If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once-loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?

Future. Crossed Out.

That’s what war does.

“They’re all different.”

“What?”

“Snowflakes. Think of that.”

I did think of that and I fell in love with her.

What you risk reveals what you value.

Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?

Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.

I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?

It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.

They had notebooks with them mostly. His life-story, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.

I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.

Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.

My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.

The one is about you, the other about someone else.