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""Ladies and gentlemen, alas! The Emperor is dead." The news from St. Helena goes out across Europe, but in fact Napoleon has not died. By means of an ingenious escape, he has returned to the Continent, leaving an impersonator on St. Helena, and it is this double who has unexpectedly and very problematically passed away. Traveling incognito, the emperor experiences a series of bizarre adventures that bring him face-to-face with the myth of Napoleon as it is disconcertingly played out in everyday life. After a visit to Waterloo and a near arrest at the French border, he eventually arrives in Paris, where he falls in with some veteran Bonapartists and visits an asylum where most of the inmates are laboring under the mistaken impression that they are he. Will Napoleon ever recapture his true identity? Who, in the end, is he, now that "the Emperor is dead"? Simon Leys's truculent, delightful fable poses these and other questions in a rare work of fiction that is continually surprising and effervescent"--… (more)
User reviews
But Napoleon is nothing if not enterprising. He attempts to complete his journey on his own, traveling, as he believes, incognito. He takes a tourist's day off day trip to Waterloo and is mortified at the blatant exploitation of his name and the zealotry of entrepreneurs who have him sleeping in beds he’s never seen. He is infuriated to find so-called battlefield veterans acting as guides who never heard a shot fired anywhere much less on these fields of war.
In his persona as Eugène, Napoleon gets to hear the peoples’ assessment of him and to engage in an introspective voyage of his own. To an extent, Leys allows Napoleon some redemption by permitting him to integrate to a degree with the common people he once was emperor over.
Leys wants us to see how even the once most powerful man is a victim to the insolence of history and that once his day in the sun is passed, he is forever unable to reassert himself back into his public identity without being thought insane. In the end, after being "reincarnated" by the author, Napoleon receives no better treatment by him than he did by the British who twice held him prisoner.