Napoleon 1. [antikvár]

The Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, stood in his stirrups, pulling on the reins of his Arab as it pawed the ground. Caulaincourt, grand equerry and aide-de-camp, and the rest of the Imperial suite kept a respectful distance. Their horses stamped and jostled, and every now and then, the officers' sabres clattered. The Emperor was in front of them alone. He looked at the ruins looming out of the fog. He recognized an avenue of lime trees and, at the end of it, the monastery of the Order of Minims. This was all that remained of the Military School of Brienne, which he had attended for five years, from when he was a little boy of not yet ten, who was teased by the other pupils because he had a bizarre, foreign name: Napoleone Buonaparte. Napoleone — they thought it sounded ridiculous, like 'Paille au nei Straw on the Nose, and they used to chant 'Napoleone Buonaparte, Paille-au-Nez' to try to provoke him. Only twenty years later, on 2 December 1804, in Notre Dame, he had taken the Emperor's crown from Pope Pius VII's hands and crowned himself. He was Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France. He was only thirty-six years old. He had come from Paris the day before because he wanted to see this part of the country and this school again, not knowing that it was now no more than a heap of rubble that bore witness to the tumult of those intervening twenty years. Shut down in 1793 and sold as national property, converted into a caisson factory and then, after the workshops had been moved, sold again for a pittance, the school had finally been demolished in 1799 and used for raw materials. He had spent five years there, the hardest years of his life, alone in a country where, to all intents and purposes, he was a foreigner. But he had become Napoleon Bonaparte, Emperor of France, and in the meantime, only twenty years had passed.