No Hero

NAPOLEON IN HIS TIME (440 pp.)--

Jean Savant--Thomas Nelson & Sons ($6.50).

To see Napoleon as he really was, French Historian Jean Savant went on the principle that no man is a hero to his valet. He rounded up eyewitness accounts of valets and those Napoleon treated as valets: mistresses, bodyguards and generals, tailors, aides-de-camp, and such luminaries of the age as Goethe and Metternich. Out of the intimate, often lurid documentation emerges no hero but a devastating closeup of the man who convinced Frenchmen they were a race of heroes, and split nations apart like ripe fruit to show that "given 500,000 men, one can do anything."

"I will do you French all the harm I can." So said the pint-sized (5 ft. 2 in.), pale-faced Corsican named Buonaparte, who shunned his military schoolmates, read Plutarch in the library instead of playing games. Classmate Louis de Bourrienne also had the luck to be standing with 23-year-old Napoleon, then an out-at-the-elbow discharged officer, as he watched the howling mob sweep through the Tuileries to crown Louis XVI with the red cap of Liberty. He recorded young Buonaparte's Italian exclamation: "Che coglione! How could they let that rabble in? They should have swept away four or five hundred with cannon, and the others would still be running."

Cheating at Games. An icy eye for the main chance and a fanatic's ambition were the talents Buonaparte brought to post-revolutionary France. "Can one be revolutionary enough? Marat and Robespierre, those are my saints!" he proclaimed at the Siege of Toulon. The sentiments gave him his general's epaulets at the age of 24. But witty young Victorine de Chastenay, with whom Napoleon played parlor games, was quick to see that "the republican general had no republican principles or beliefs."

Young Buonaparte in his scrounging days amused the salons by decking himself in napkins and tablecloths to give improvisations. He cheated at games, drank his coffee out of the saucer, courted well-placed mistresses to get quartermaster handouts for his uniforms, proposed to women years his senior to land a fortune. In the end he settled for the wanton Creole widow, Rose-Josephine de Beauharnais. A French marriage, he felt, would make him French, and he changed his name accordingly, dropping the "u." Later he admitted that Josephine had come straight from another lover's bed, but there was sentiment of a sort. On St. Helena Napoleon confessed: "I really did love her; I had no respect for her. She was too much of a liar. But there was something taking about her. She was a true woman. She had the prettiest little tail imaginable."

The Napoleon known to history emerged with incredible rapidity. The small figure in his green chasseur's uniform and white waistcoat and breeches became a kind of miniature god of war who presided over incredible carnage without blinking. After the defeat at Moscow. Napoleon told Austria's Metternich: "The French can't complain of me. To spare them. I've sacrificed Germans and Poles. I lost 300,000 men, but only 30,000 were French." Retorted Metternich sharply: "You forget, Sire, that you are speaking to a German."

Pilfering Snuffboxes. All but invincible in the saddle, Napoleon was all too vulnerable at home. He hated to get up in the morning, indulged in two-hour-long hot baths, delighted in being rubbed down with Eau de Cologne by his valet. At work he tipped back in his chair, whittled away with a penknife on the arm of a chair. In council meetings he made such a habit of pilfering snuffboxes that his ministers resorted to bringing their snuff in cardboard boxes. Worried about becoming fat, Napoleon stoked himself through the day with licorice flavored with anisette. He bolted his breakfast, wolfed dinner in only 15 to 20 minutes.

Even Napoleon's amorous after-hours relaxation has been meticulously recorded, once because a reigning actress, Mlle George, was so frightened by what she described as Bonaparte's epileptic seizure that she brought the whole palace running to their bed. An endless procession of soubrettes glided through Napoleon's boudoir (and left with bodices stuffed with bank notes). Scholar Savant is ready to take the word of contemporaries that the procession included the Emperor's sisters and stepdaughter.

At Josephine's chateau at Malmaison, Napoleon (a very bad shot) delighted in shooting at the Empress' swans to torment her. When in good spirits, he would slap Josephine on the shoulders while she begged, "Do stop it, do stop it, Bonaparte." Josephine's maid, Mlle. Avrillon, recalled, "We could estimate the degree of his good humor by how much he hurt us. One day when he was obviously better pleased than usual, he pinched my cheek so hard I could not repress a scream."

Getting the Goods. Just before going to Notre Dame to crown himself Emperor, he could not resist dragging his older brother to a looking glass, gloating, "Joseph, if our father could see us!" In the field he dressed plainly, had to be told by his sister to wear, suspenders because "your breeches always seem to be on the point of falling down." Leger, his tailor, reported indignantly turning down the Emperor's request to patch a pair of hunting breeches. And though Napoleon ennobled all his brothers, behind the scenes he ranted like any Corsican bourgeois, broke up one family council by musing aloud: "Suppose we sum up. Lucien is an ingrate. Joseph a Sardanapalus. Louis a paralytic. Jerome a scamp. As for you, ladies, you know what you are." Thanks to Author Jean Savant, the reader also gets all the goods on Napoleon Bonaparte.

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