#napoleonic books

[microcosme11]

Reading

Histoire des Cent-Jours by Charles-Éloi Vial, 2021.

I like to read about the 100 Days because it is so bizarre. This book is good, I like it. My reading French (speaking is quite negligible) is "okay" and I am translating some paragraphs.

I often focus on the Flight of the Eagle since that is the most remarkable and romantic part of the story. But did Napoleon ever think, "How am I really going to re-take over the government?" Did he think he could re-establish his Empire? His Empire was already obsolete in the minds of the populace. He had become kind of an historical figure of the past. Many former adherents wanted nothing to do with him. Many were extremely skeptical (for good reason) that he could remain in power. It was inevitable that there would be a European coalition against him, and France was completely tired of wars. Many people were jaded and indifferent to his return, merely waiting to see what would happen.

I'm still reading it and have a long way to go....

[usergreenpixel]

MALMAISON MEDIA SALON SOIRÉE 17: THE PRINCESS OF NOWHERE (2010)

1. The Introduction

Hello, Dear Neighbors. Thank you for joining the party today. I’m feeling better, fortunately, and I’m ready to analyze media again.

Fittingly, today we’re talking about Pauline Bonaparte, the woman who had a scandalous reputation back in the day and seems like a typical party girl. Since I do like the woman, I’ve always been curious as to what kind of media is out there that tells her story.

Sure, there’s the movie called “Imperial Venus”, but it looks like Pauline is far more obscure than some of her family members (and don’t even get me started on Napoleon). So you can imagine how intrigued I was after stumbling across this particular book, written by a distant descendant of the Borghese family.

I’ll admit that the author’s identity did cause concern for me, mainly due to the potential for slander and negative bias to wriggle their way into the narrative, but the premise about the story being told from the prospective of a character close to Pauline seemed intriguing so I gave the book a shot.

Luckily, it’s available in free PDF form here. And, without spoilers, the read was… interesting.

This review is dedicated to @aminoscribbles .

2. The Summary

This is the story of Pauline Bonaparte and her tumultuous and toxic relationship with Prince Camillo Borghese, told from the point of view of Pauline’s foster daughter and distant cousin, Sophie Leclerc.

(Sophie is an original character btw. )

Sounds like an interesting idea with potential, but let’s keep going.

3. The Story

First of all, due to all the POV switching and the focus on Paulette, you can pretty much forget about Sophie since she fades into the background rather quickly and becomes irrelevant faster than a new fashion trend. Kinda makes me wonder why she was even in the book to begin with.

The plot pacing is also clunky, clumsily intertwined with flashbacks and fictional letters, but apparently the author is writing for the first time so of course it’s not going to be flawless. Still, I do wish he worked a bit more on the story before publication. 

The negative bias also is there but it’s a weird mixed bag and not as bad as I expected - there’s at least an attempt to make Pauline a complex character and tell the story of a toxic yet ultimately loving couple, so points for effort.

Unfortunately, the story speed runs through moments like Pauline joining Napoleon on Elba, moments that could’ve given us more of a glimpse into her character and would definitely be more engaging than the awfully long sex scenes in the book.

4. The Characters

As I said, Sophie becomes irrelevant fairly quickly so I’m not sure what to make of her. She’s a very flat character whose initial admiration for Pauline isn’t properly justified. Nor is her relationship with the woman properly explored. A shame and a waste of potential, really.

Pauline herself isn’t evil like I expected, so it’s a pleasant surprise. However, she’s still capricious, selfish and careless. She does have nice moments like personally nursing Sophie back to health and she does genuinely grieve her husband and later her son.

However, all the nice moments are undermined by the moment when it’s revealed that Pauline poisoned herself and Sophie with arsenic to make Borghese believe that they got sick and send them to France. Err… WTF?!

(Yes, she does that in the book, even though the real Pauline was so sickly that she wouldn’t even NEED poison. As for poisoning a child… can’t imagine her doing so.)

Borghese himself is, naturally, almost a saint (duh), but still makes mistakes here and there, so he’s just flat and we never see a deeper dive into his relationship with Pauline.

To be honest, all characters are flat and underdeveloped so let’s move on.

5. The Setting

Some descriptions are good but, again, underdeveloped.

6. The Writing

The writing style is actually solid and sometimes engaging, but there are a few instances of Pauline being a bit too crass to feel realistic and those sex scenes are boring as hell.

Couple that with flashbacks and letters and yeah… it’s a hit or miss at best.

7. The Conclusion

All in all, definitely not an awful book. I’ve seen MUCH worse. That being said, it’s not a good book either. Just… decent but underbaked.

Check it out if you want, but it’s still biased towards Borghese and doesn’t do Pauline justice, unfortunately. It’s a mixed bag for me though so I will not reread this book.

Anyway, on that note, let us end our tiny soirée. Stay tuned for more reviews, everyone!

Love,

Citizen Green Pixel

[maggiec70]

Hello, dear Tumblr grandmother. I have a question…

HOW THE FUCK DID YOU HANDLE “THE QUEEN’S FORTUNE”?! I’m listening to the prologue of the book and I’m already not impressed!!!

I have a high tolerance for Really Awful Historical Fiction simply because the rewards from writing blistering, scathing, eviscerating reviews of said books are so great. Not to mention compelling the scribblers of the Awful Books to have heart failure and attempt to retaliate. I got two of them banned from Goodreads for their feeble attempts to take on my reviews.

[apurpledust]

I have some more free time lately so I took screenshots of Junot from the book D. João Carioca: A corte portuguesa chega ao Brasil in chronological order! he looks so silly :3 (sadly he only appears for like 3 pages)

I used google translate for the translation (press "ALT") 👇😋

[thekenobee]

Sharpe + Incorrect Quotes (Part 4)

[vorbarrsultana]

i finished rereading the first four vorkosigan books (+ "the flowers of vashnoi" because ekaterin!!!), and you really have to feel for piotr vorkosigan because what a nightmare life, truly.

imagine you are born just in time for your world to be unified by dorca vorbarra and rediscovered by people from wider galaxy. things are finally looking good, for the first time in 600 years of isolation there is no more feudal infighting, and the promise of galactic medicine and technologies being available lightens everyone's perspectives. sure, your grandpa is called count pierre "le sanguinaire", but who doesn't have terrible relatives?

then you are 15, and suddenly your planet is attacked by the aggressive eugenecist space empire hell-bent on subjugating your people and turning them into disposable material for unethical genetic experiments. you flee into the mountains, away from your family, and create guerrilla forces from locals sworn to your dad, and it's really terrible for a very long time. you have no high-tech weapons and no food, you sleep in a cave in the dead of winter, and the cetagandans try everything (from carpet bombing to chemical weapons) to murder you.

but hey, at least you now have your bff ezar vorbarra, and (from the bff's words on his deathbed) it sounds like you two had so much fun between unimaginable horrors and despair, and it's not surprising, since no one really believes in death after life at 20. then the emperor makes you a general at the tender age of 22. fortunately for him, you & bff make a frighteningly competent dream-team, and the joke's on cetagandans.

then, several years later, you ask the emperor for weapons, because you still sleep on the bare cave floor, there are little resources, and every ghem on the planet is trying to murder you. he offers you the hand of his granddaughter instead, like it's some sort of twisted fairytale, but you grow to love your olivia more than anything, and the tide of war is finally turning, and you allow yourself to entertain the idea of peaceful life, and then...

the space eugenecist empire nukes your hometown, killing your mom, dad, surviving brothers, and two hundred thousand of your people. plus your bff (ezar) gets a radiation doze large enough for it to cause severe cancer thirty years later. great.

but you win! your district is in shambles, your capital is an irradiated crater, your castle is in ruins, but you win! the old dorca dies, and yuri ascends the throne, but politicking is secondary to the fact that you are alive.

yes, you are probably not entirely sane, and you've long forgotten what the peaceful times look like, but you are alive, just under 35, and your entire life is ahead of you. olivia is alive too, and ezar, and you now have three wonderful children, and the extended vorpatril-vorbarra family that hosts regular get-togethers. sure, your mom-in-law is a betan with all sorts of crazy ideas in her head, but she is not pierre vorrutyer. small mercies.

but then the new emperor goes mad, and decides to murder your entire family overnight. your brothers-in-law are gone, one of your sisters-in-law too, and all your nephews and nieces except little padma. but all of this pales in comparison to the facts that olivia is murdered, and that your heir and daughter lay dead beside her.

all you have left of her, of your house, of the family you've lost in vashnoi not a ten years ago, is aral, whom you keep by your side throughout the bloody civil war to put your bff on the throne.

but you win again. you are 43, and ezar vorbarra is now the emperor. you are responsible for the imperium's entire ground forces. you are also responsible for a severely traumatized boy of 13, and the only children you've interacted with without olivia's genle guidance were little messengers of guerilla companies.

what a mess.

[alter-koker]

my school library regularly purges its outdated books and just gives them away for free. usually theyre just technical books that arent interesting to anyone, but i found an old book on fan culture, which contained this gem

[divorcedwife]

more novels for babies

[mathildeaquisexta]

Rare Chéché portrait

Don't bother him, he's doing his homework

From Le Grand amour de Fouché : Ernestine de Castellane, 1931

[cedyat]

PSA: Tsar Alexander I liked dick jokes!

I think. Little Explanation: On the 5th of May 1807 while the war of the fourth Coalition is in full swing Frederick William III writes this inconspicuous sentence in a letter to his wife:

"The grand duke [Constantine] is in Schwansfeld, a name whose double meaning has greatly amused the Emperor [Alexander]."*

Schwansfeld can be translated literally as "swan's field" or "field of swans", but what is the other meaning?

Well, "Schwans-" sounds very similar to "Schwanz", a word meaning "tail". However, "Schwanz" can also mean dick. I looked up whether it was already used in this way 200 years ago and in fact: yes! It was already slang all the way back in the 1600's and even Goethe uses it. So with that in mind the other meaning would be "dick field". A theory that I feel is even backed up by the fact that the full name of this town is "Großschwansfeld" so -> "big dick field".

TL;DR: Either I am too dumb to understand a simple pun or one of the most powerful man of his time had the humor of a 12-year old.

* Briefwechsel der Königin Luise mit ihrem Gemahl Friedrich Wilhelm III, p. 299

[akaryotic]

some of my favourite lines from the mfu books so far (1-6) (p. 2) (p. 3)

ive been making a tally just for fun to keep track of how many times solo and kuryakin get shot/drugged/captured/tortured respectively and i might post it when i finish the series if anyone would like to see it LMAO

[microcosme11]

Napoleon se souvient (Napoleon Remembers) by Odette Dossios-Pralat, 1999.

At first, I thought this was real! There was an Introduction by a fictional scholar who found this journal by Napoleon. But it's a novel, in the form of Napoleon's personal journal written by him on St. Helena. [Somehow the fictional scholar was able to read Napoleon's handwriting.] I like it very much. It really sounds like the voice of Napoleon ruminating about mistakes he might have made that landed him on St. Helena.

[usergreenpixel]

Dear Neighbors, next up is a bit of Spanish media. A book called “El Encargo del Maestro Goya” (The Task of Master Goya) and it’s about the Peninsular War, so I dedicate it to @josefavomjaaga . Let’s hope Soult isn’t the looter in the story ;)

There’s no English translation, but maybe it will be translated in the future. Who knows 😊

(Also one of the protagonists is deaf and Goya is deaf historically so I’m cautiously excited about the disability representation…)

Anyway, stay tuned and don’t mind me while I’m acting all excited.

[vintagehomecollection]

Interior Visions: Great American Designers and the Showcase House, 1988

[apurpledust]

guys I was reading this book written in the 1950s, which is basically a fictionized retelling of Napoleon's life, but it really reads more like a romantic biography. The author includes this Napjuno crumb,,,,

oh my goddddd someone sedate me also there's this scene with Napoleon sort of joking with Murat before revealing his displeasure of Junot's "indiscreet disclosures"

the part mentioning Junot's death😭

[chirp-a-chirp]

Napoleon: Everyone keeps flirting with you.

MC: You’re exaggerating!

Napoleon: In front of me.

MC: T-that can’t be!

Vlad: Here are flowers. Free of course.

Le Comte: Let me dress you, Ma Cherie.

Arthur: Wanna makeout luv?

Napoleon: NO.