His next significant composition was Sur !

'Amour de Ia Patrie, written

in Paris in 1787. The basic notion of love of a fatherland is illustrated

entirely from antiquity or the history of Corsica, and France features

merely as the personification of hubris or overweening ambition. But the

most significant thing about this essay is that it was composed just five

days after he lost his virginity to the Breton prostitute in the Palais Royal.

Napoleon's guilt about sexuality is evident, for he pitches into modern

woman and suggests that the female sex should emulate the women of

Sparta. 'You, who now chain men's hearts to your chariot wheels, that

sex whose whole merit is contained in a glittering exterior, reflect here

upon your triumph [i.e. in Sparta] and blush at what you no longer are.'

This essay is a priceless clue to Napoleon's inner psychic development. In

thrall to a 'mother complex', Napoleon clearly found the encounter with

the prostitute traumatic, as it threatened his ties to Letizia. At the

unconscious level, therefore, the Spartan matron content to see her dead

son brought home on a shield is conflated with the idealized picture of the

'Spartan' Letizia carrying Napoleon in the womb while fleeing in the

maquis.

Usually, however, the spur for Napoleon's writings lay nearer the

surface, in the books he had just devoured. His taste in reading was

catholic, embracing a historical novel about Alcibiades, the back-to-

nature novel La Chaumiere Indienne by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, a

popular psychology book The Art of Judging Character from Men 's Faces

by Jean Gaspard Lavater, Buffon's Histoire Naturelle, Marigny's History

of the Arabs, Voltaire's Essai sur les M11?urs, Rollin's Ancient History,

Lavaux's biography of Frederick the Great, Plato, Machiavelli and Coxe

on Switzerland. The famous example of dramatic irony, which all

biographers comment on, occurred when he was perusing the Abbe de Ia

44

Croix's Geographie and wrote in his notebook 'St Helena, small island' .

He was at one time totally absorbed in John Barrow's History of England

and made a hundred pages of manuscript notes on it. Some critics of

Napoleon say that he read too many second-rate authors, who simply put

the reader through a series of paradoxical hoops in the eighteenth-century

manner and produced a warped view of the world and historical events.

But we should remember that he was also reading Montesquieu,

Corneille, Plutarch, Adam Smith and other classics at the same time, so

this thesis cannot be pushed too far.

A more interesting study is the use to which Napoleon put his

omnivorous reading in his own writings. His early short story, Le Masque

Prophete, derives heavily from Marigny's history of the Arabs, and the

ghost story, Le Comte d'Essex, set in England in 1 683 , relies wholly on

Barrow's history. Another piece of fiction, inspired by his research for the