The Cream of the Jest by James Branch Cabell

Nightly he went adventuring with Ettarre: and they saw the cities and manners of many men, to an extent undreamed-of by Ithaca's mundivagant king; and among them even those three persons who had most potently influenced human life.

For once, in an elongated room with buff-colored walls -- having scarlet hangings over its windows, and seeming larger than it was in reality, because of its many mirrors -- they foregathered with Napoleon, on the evening of his coronation: the emperor of half-Europe was fretting over an awkward hitch in the day's ceremony, caused by his sisters' attempt to avoid carrying the Empress Josephine's train; and he was grumbling because the old French families continued to ignore him, as a parvenu. In a neglected orchard, sun-steeped and made drowsy by the murmur of bees, they talked with Shakespeare; the playwright, his nerves the worse for the preceding night's potations, was peevishly complaining of the meager success of his later comedies, worrying over Lord Pembroke's neglect of him, and trying to concoct a masque in the style of fat Ben Jonson, since that was evidently what the theater-patronizing public wanted. And they were with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem, on the evening of a day when the sky had been black and the earth had trembled; and Pilate, benevolent and replete with supper, was explaining the latest theories concerning eclipses and earthquakes to his little boy, and chuckling with fond pride in the youngster's intelligent questions.