The guns at Toulon were still hot when Napoleon took off his gloves.

Smoke from the harbor clung to his uniform, the tang of gunpowder and salt hung thick in his throat.

The French royalists, who still wanted a king on the throne, were fleeing.

And their allies, the British Navy, were pulling away from the port with ragged sails and splintered ships.

This had been Napoleon's plan, his artillery placements, his outmaneuvering of the British fleet

that made it happen, not luck, not speeches, and certainly not fine aristocratic manners.

Strategy. Born Napoleone de Bonaparte, the man who would become the symbol of

French domination and then pint-size arrogance, wasn't French at all. He had grown up on Corsica,

a rocky little island that was historically Italian, part of Genoa, but was given to France in

1768 thanks to the Treaty of Versailles. A year later,

Napoleon was born, so technically he was French, but was ferociously culturally coarse. Kind of

the way Puerto Ricans or Hawaiian are technically American, but they definitely have their own

extremely robust culture. So the finery of French customs and language were foreign to Napoleon,

as were harsh continental winters. He'd never seen snow or ice until he came to Paris in 1794

as a young artillery officer in the thick of the French Revolution, and he stayed in a chateau so

cold, his water froze in its glass, mesmerizing him. The people of Paris, well, they gave him

an equally chilly reception, sneering at his coarse country behavior and stilted French and

provincial clothes. And it's true, he was kind of a weirdo. He was obsessed with baths, which

not everyone was back then. He was terrified

of cats. I mean, terrified of cats and was absolutely not able to laugh at himself. One time,

at a fancy French party, he bungled some saying and everyone laughed at him. And instead of just,

you know, ha ha ha, yeah, gritting his teeth and laughing it off

...