The Napoleon of the People

The Napoleon of the People is by Honoré de Balzac, translated by Ellen Marriage and Clara Bell. A character named Goguelat, an ex-soldier who served under Napoleon in an infantry regiment, tells a story to a group of peasants. The speaker tells his friends that Napoleon was born in Corsica, a French island warmed by the Italian sun, where it is like a furnace and everything is scorched up.

The speaker says that Napoleon had undertaken to keep his secret to himself, which is why those who accompanied him, and even his especial friends, used to drop like nuts: Duroc, Bessieres, Lannes. The speaker says what fine times they were, when colonels became generals whilst you were looking at them, generals became marshals of France, and marshals became kings. The speaker says it was on March 1st that Napoleon set out with two hundred men to conquer the kingdom of France and Navarre, which by March 20th had become the French Empire again.