Friday, July 24, 2015

Library.

 This is coolbert:

From that Strategy Page Professor Al Nofi  CIC entry # 445 we have this item:

•"Among personal items that Napoleon abandoned in his flight from the field of Waterloo were his silver service, including his chamber pot, his 400 volume traveling library, and a bottle of rum"

With regard to the traveling library:

1. "Napoleon’s traveling library"

 NO absolute and concise listing of the contents of the library other than:

"There should be forty works on religion, forty dramatic works, forty volumes of epic and sixty of other poetry, one hundred novels and sixty volumes of history, the remainder being historical memoirs of every period.”

2. "Bonaparte the Bookworm – Napoleon Was An Avid Reader; So What Were His Favourite Books?"

From this web site we have a slightly better understanding of what that traveling library consisted of:

"40 volumes on religion, 40 of epics, 40 of plays, 60 of poetry, 100 of novels, 60 of history, the remainder, to make up the 1,000, of historical memoirs."

"The religious works are to be the Old and New Testament, the Koran, a selection from the works of the Fathers of the Church, works respecting the Arians, Calvinists, a Mythology."

"The epics are to be Homer, Lucan, Tasso, Telemachus, the Henriade,"

"Among the novels were to be the masterpieces of Fielding, Richardson and Le Sage"

Napoleon an educated man with the military background, a graduate of the French Ecole Militaire. Able to read the classics in the original language, Latin and Greek? Of this I am not sure.

Napoleon thought to have had a relatively high IQ, around 145 or so [near genius] and it seems that intelligence coupled with a rather profound intellectual curiosity.

AND A PERSON DURING HIS LIFETIME HAVING NEVER STOPPED LEARNING!

coolbert.





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