Napoleon Bonaparte died on 5 May 1821 on the island of St. Helena and yet he is one of the immortals as he continues to inspire mankind.
Thoughts and quotes about and by the Emperor:
Rémusat: Napoleon 'was fond of everything which inclined towards reverie: the poems of Ossian, subdued light, melancholy music. He loved to listen to the murmur of the wind, spoke with rapture of the roar of the sea; was inclined to believe in ghosts and was generally superstitious....Listening to subdued and slow music, he would fall into a kind of trance which none of us dared interrupt by the slightest movement.’
'He rhapsodises of how he and the Empress will spend his old age ‘in visiting, with my own horses like a plain country couple, every corner of the empire; in receiving complaints, redressing wrongs, in doing good everywhere and by every means!...These were among my dreams!’
At the age of 17, he wrote in his journal as follows:‘Always alone in the midst of men, I go back home that I may give myself up to my lonely dreams and to the waves of my melancholy. Whither will my thoughts tend tonight? Towards death....How far removed human beings are from nature! How base they are and contemptible!...Life has become a burden to me, because the men I live with and probably am doomed to live with in the future are as different from me as moonlight differs from sunshine.’
No comments:
Post a Comment