THE NAPOLEON OF THE PEOPLE

BY

HONORE DE BALZAC



PREPARER'S NOTE

The Napoleon of the People was originally published in Le Medicin
de Campagne (The Country Doctor). It is a story told to a group of
peasants by the character of Goguelat, an ex-soldier who served
under Napoleon in an infantry regiment. It was later included in
Folk-tales of Napoleon: Napoleonder from the Russian, a collection
of stories by various authors. This translation is by Ellen
Marriage and Clara Bell.



Napoleon, you see, my friends, was born in Corsica, which is a French
island warmed by the Italian sun; it is like a furnace there,
everything is scorched up, and they keep on killing each other from
father to son for generations all about nothing at all--'tis a notion
they have. To begin at the beginning, there was something
extraordinary about the thing from the first; it occurred to his
mother, who was the handsomest woman of her time, and a shrewd soul,
to dedicate him to God, so that he should escape all the dangers of
infancy and of his after life; for she had dreamed that the world was
on fire on the day he was born. It was a prophecy! So she asked God to