Paris Writing

Napoleonic Paris and Environs Slideshow

March 20, 2012 – 8:24 pm

In March of last year, I was in Paris and Corsica, gathering inspiration at Napoleonic sites. In May, my St Helena trip rounded out my first-hand impressions of Napoleon from youth to dying exile. Now, as I near completion of a draft of my novel, I reflect on what depth those experiences have lent to my writing. In many cases, a room, a field, a color, a salt breeze may be remembered, not just imagined. I hope these subtle details add texture to the work.

Have I captured the essence of the Man? He certainly lives with me day to day, chapter to chapter, as I write. He’s an elusive character, slipping away at times until a firm-handed edit calls him back to the page. Sometimes, I find I like the young Napoleon better and the older one a little less.  In the end, my future readers will judge if I’ve succeeded.

Meanwhile, thanks to my husband Bert Helfinstein, here’s a five-minute slideshow of the Napoleonic sites we visited in and around Paris. I hope you enjoy it! And thank you, Bert, for having the skill and generosity to create it.

 

Permalink | Comments (3)
Miscellany

Encyclopedia Britannica Goes Fully Digital

March 15, 2012 – 10:01 pm

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that the 2010 publication is its last print edition.  First published in 1768, the year before Napoleon Bonaparte’s birth, this venerable reference source is going totally digital. Although I love hard-copy books, the announcement wouldn’t normally bother me. After all, the internet is a practical way to keep information up-to-date and accessible to the widest audience.

But take a moment to visit the Britannica website. This week, as a promotion for their paid subscription service, they’ve opened the full archive for free-of-charge browsing. Look over the extensive article on Napoleon I. If you are like me, you will find the web page so replete with animated advertising—some of it the lowest of the low: take 20 years of wrinkles off your face with miracle cream—that you can barely concentrate on what you’re reading.  If you want to peruse the article’s accompanying video clips, you must listen to a 15- or 30-second ad before each clip plays. I gave up after three, although I was interested in seeing all the clips.

In his day, my grandfather, Carlos Castillo (1889-1967), a University of Chicago professor, contributed articles to the Encyclopedia. I personally love displaying in my own library the 1948 set my husband’s mother gave to him (pictured above). Still, I’m not a romantic when it comes to information. I don’t mind a reasonable amount of advertising, but the Britannica has overdone it. I hope in the future they will moderate their advertising as professionally as they curate their content.

(Postscript: I downloaded the free mobile ap to my iPad. It was advertising-free. What’s the strategy here, marketing gurus at Britannica?)

 

 

Permalink | Comment (1)
Miscellany The Man

Napoleon Portrait Painted by a Woman

February 26, 2012 – 9:27 pm

Today, I visited the “Royalists to Romantics” exhibit at the National Museum of the Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. The collection of seventy paintings on loan from the Louvre, Versailles, and other French museums were all produced by women between 1750 and 1850, a time when women artists were marginalized.

One of the artists, Marie Guilhelmine Benoist (1768 – 1826) painted this portrait of Napoleon in 1809. She also painted portraits of Napoleon’s sisters Pauline and Elisa, as well as his second wife, Marie Louise. As far as I know, this is the only contemporaneous painting of the Emperor painted by a woman.

Even for that turbulent time, the artist Marie Benoist led an interesting life. Before the French revolution, she had studied under the best-known female and male artists of the time, Élisabeth Louise Vigée LeBrun and Jacques-Louis David. Later, David accused her husband of plotting Queen Marie Antoinette’s rescue. The husband fled the country, returning two years later when the political situation had cooled down. In 1800, she caused a stir with what is now her best known work, the Portrait of a Negress (in the Louvre). After that success, she received commissions to do several essentially propaganda portraits of Napoleon and his family.

This life-sized portrait of the Emperor, now in the Musée d’Angers, follows the classical mode of a ruler surrounded with symbols of power.  In this case, they seem carelessly strewn about. It’s hard to tell from my photo, but in the original, Napoleon’s face appears weary, weak, and worried. He was famously impatient when sitting for his portrait. Perhaps, relaxing in the disarming presence of a woman painter, he forgot to project his customary strength.

The contrast to Benoise’s portrait of the partially nude black woman is striking.  Inspired by the French abolition of slavery and the unfulfilled promise of women’s rights, her unnamed subject projects power without reliance on false, external trappings. Her manifest dignity is utterly modern.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Paris The Man

A “Napoleonland” Theme Park to Rival Paris Disneyland?

January 31, 2012 – 9:09 pm

The French don’t have a national museum devoted to Napoleon, but French politician Yves Jégo is proposing to build a “Napoleonland,” a theme park based on the legacy of Napoleon and the First Empire. The chosen site is near Disneyland Paris, on the grounds of the 1814 Battle of Montereau, a Napoleonic victory over the Austrians during the War of the Sixth Coalition.

At first, it’s heartening to see the French honoring their best known historical figure, but then the silliness begins. The Telegraph and The Economist quote Jégo as envisioning tourists skiing through a Russian battlefield “surrounded by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses.” He’d have reenactments of Louis XVI being guillotined. The Battle of Waterloo and the naval Battle of Trafalgar, both French disasters, would be recreated every day. “It’s going to be fun for the whole family,” Mr. Jégo told the London Times.

Is this mockery simply British bias or does it reflect the former French minister and history buff’s intentions? Perhaps we’ll hear the whole story on February 18th when Yves Jégo makes a full announcement.

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting that the French victory at Montereau only briefly slowed the Coalition’s invasion of France. Eight weeks later, Napoleon abdicated and accepted exile on Elba with an annual pension of 2,000,000 francs.  The pension, however, was never paid, contributing to Napoleon’s decision to escape Elba and return to France for his Hundred Days rule before his defeat at Waterloo.

 

Permalink | Comments (7)
Corsica Saint Helena The Man

Bonapartes Branded Corsican Outcasts

January 17, 2012 – 12:32 pm

In exile on St Helena, Napoleon regretted not enriching Corsica when, as French emperor, he easily could have. Having developed an idyllic memory of his youth, he dictated to his secretary Las Cases that, “the Bonaparte family had retired [from Corsica] to Nice [in mainland France].”

Napoleon’s last visit to Corsica was a quick stopover in 1799 on the way back from Egypt. Soon to be First Consul, he was already the war hero of Toulon and the Italian Campaign. The Corsicans feted him as a famous returning son, but that wasn’t how he had left six years before.

On graduation from French military school in 1785, sixteen-year-old Napoleon received his commission as a second lieutenant. He spent the next eight years shuttling between stints in the army and long leaves in Corsica. This period, encompassing the turbulent years of the French Revolution, was an equally unsettled time in Corsica. Local factions vied for power and argued for either independence, integration in the French republic, or alliance with Britain. After a struggle that makes today’s partisanship seem tame, Napoleon and his brother Joseph were rejected politically and personally.

In May, 1793, the Corsican assembly voted unanimously “to inflict on the individuals making up [the family] Bonaparte an eternal brand that renders their name and their memory detestable to [all Corsican] patriots.” Napoleon went underground, hiding out for a time at the 16th century Tour de la Parata until his own faction rescued him. He in turn rescued the rest of the family.

On St Helena, Napoleon recalled that the British had ransacked the family home in Ajaccio. In reality, it was his fellow Corsicans.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Miscellany Writing

Pushcart Prize Nomination

December 25, 2011 – 4:06 pm

This fall, The Delmarva Review published my short story, “Mrs. Morrisette.” Now, they’ve nominated it for inclusion in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology. According to the Pushcart website, “The Pushcart Prize – Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.” Next April, I’ll find out if my story made it into this year’s publication, but regardless of the outcome, it’s a great honor to have my work nominated.

Here’s how “Mrs. Morrisette” begins:

“Mrs. Morrisette had taken to sunbathing in the nude. Mr. Morrisette blamed it on those damned Frenchies. One vacation on St. Barts and suddenly Mrs. Morrisette was a nudist.”

To read the rest, download an e-book of The Delmarva Review Volume 4 at Amazon or purchase it in hard copy directly from the publisher.

Tags , | Permalink | Comment (0)
Corsica The Man

Napoleon’s Corsican Grotto

December 13, 2011 – 8:12 pm

Young Napoleon, growing up in a household in which his mother seemed always to be pregnant, sought out solitary refuges. One was a wooden lean-to on the family porch, another was a grotto on the outskirts of Ajaccio. Legend says he was hiding in this second spot, when his father and the Count de Marbeuf (then the French governor of the island) came to tell him his scholarship at military school in France had been approved.

The illustration of Charles Bonaparte and Marbeuf visiting Napoleon at his grotto comes from a beautiful new edition of Napoléon Bonaparte Une Jeunesse Corse (A Corsican Youth) written by Jean-Baptiste Marcaggi (1866-1933), a Napoleon scholar from Corsica. I picked up a copy last spring at the Château de Malmaison, Napoleon and Josephine’s home outside of Paris.  In addition to the link above, the publishers have a Facebook page for this charming book.

Today, Ajaccio’s villas and apartment houses surround Napoleon’s refuge. One of the town’s monuments to its famous son abuts the granite boulders. The imposing monument itself towers above a soccer field. When my husband and I visited last March, we cleaned candy wrappers and a Coke bottle from the cave. Despite the encroaching development, I could easily imagine the young boy scurrying a couple kilometers from his home to his cave in the countryside. There, Napoleon said, his “dreams [for his future] were limited only by his imagination.” Now a statue of himself as Emperor overlooks it.

Permalink | Comment (0)
Saint Helena The Man Writing

Coincidence and the Man of Destiny

November 28, 2011 – 10:37 pm

“Destiny urges me to a goal of which I am ignorant. Until that goal is attained I am invulnerable, unassailable.  When Destiny has accomplished her purpose in me, a fly may suffice to destroy me.”  Napoleon Bonaparte (from Napoleon: In His Own Words, 1916, edited by Jules Bertaut)

These words, attributed to Napoleon, reflect the belief he had in the power of an unknown force called Destiny.  Personally, I’m inclined to view Destiny, if anything, as a combination of genes, circumstance and free will.

Coincidence, too, plays a role. While I don’t think Destiny drives me to write this novel about Napoleon, here are a couple of fun coincidences:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The chair on the left is in the Briars, Napoleon’s first residence on St Helena.  The one on the right is in my library where I do most of my writing.  I inherited it from my mother who bought it at auction, then recreated the original needlepoint cover.

I took the photo on the left of the rug in Napoleon’s dining room in Longwood House on St Helena.  The photo on the right is a close-up of the similar Bokhara rug in my library at home.

I hope that my Destiny is not so tied to Napoleon’s that when I finish this book “a fly may suffice to destroy me!”

Permalink | Comment (0)
Corsica The Man

A Corsican in France, A Frenchman in Corsica

November 9, 2011 – 10:13 pm

In 1778, nine-year-old Napoleon left Ajaccio, Corsica to attend French military academy. In France, his fellow students mocked his foreign accent and chip-on-the-shoulder Corsican patriotism.  Eight years later, when he returned home for the first time, the locals thought him “Frenchified.” He struggled to relearn his childhood language and sought out old friends and places, no doubt trying as I am to “Find Napoleon.”

For several years, he vacillated between loyalty to Corsica’s independence movement and his new duty as a French army officer. In 1793, Pasquale Paoli, the Corsican leader who had been his childhood hero, declared him an outcast.  Age twenty-four, destitute, he fled to France with his entire family. After that, he returned to the island only once: in 1799, as a heroic French general on his way home to Paris after invading Egypt. Throughout his life, regardless of his successes, enemies and supporters mocked his accent.

Today, in Corsica, Ajaccio proudly promotes itself as Napoleon’s hometown. Here’s a slide show from my March 2011 visit when I got a real sense of Napoleon’s childhood.

Permalink | Comments (2)
Saint Helena

St Helena Slideshow

October 31, 2011 – 11:40 pm

While I focused on writing my novel (working title: The Eaglet’s Legacy), October has flown by. As a final post before November, here’s a reminder to take a look at the video of photos from my trip to St Helena.

Permalink | Comment (1)

Next Page »

Next Page »

Copyright © 2011, 2012 Margaret Rodenberg