Explore "The Fall of Napoleon" by Roger Pocock on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
A. D. 1812
The greatest of modern adventurers, Napoleon Bonaparte, was something short of a gentleman, a person of mean build, coarse tastes, odious manners and defective courage, yet gifted with Satanic beauty of face, charm that bewitched all fighting men, stupendous genius in war and government. Beginning as a penniless lieutenant of French artillery, he rose to be captain, colonel, general, commander-in-chief, consul of France, emperor of the French, master of Europe, almost conqueror of the world -- and he was still only thirty-three years of age, when at the height of his glory, he invaded Russia. His army of invasion was gathered from all his subject nations -- Germans, Swiss, Italians, Poles, Austrians, numbering more than half a million men, an irresistible and overwhelming force, launched like a shell into the heart of Russia.