Anecdotes of Napoleon Bonaparte, his ministers, his generals, his soldiers, and his times. His disinterment at St. Helena, and his second internment in France
Excerpt:
When the Corsicans took up arms in 1767, to re- sist the subjugation of their country to the yoke of France, Carolo Buonaparte, the father of Napoleon, quitted the gown for the sword; and under the standard of the patriot General Paoli, who was godfather to his eldest son Joseph, fought bravely, though unsuccessfully, for the liberties of his country.
While the struggle continued, Madame Buona- party, the wife of Carolo, was constantly flying from town to town, and from village to village, to avoid the French, dreading nothing so much as fulling into their hands. After repeated changes of place, during the whole time of her pregnancy, she was, on the 15th of August, 1769, two months after the Corsicans had given up the contest, de- livered of her second son, to whom the name of Napoleon was given.
They who believe in the great influence which the situation of the mother", during pregnancy, has upon the ofF^pring, will perhaps, attribute the active and enterprising spirit of the son, to the restless Ufe led, at this period, by the mother. The present pope, Pius the Seventh, was excessively struck with the circumstance, when it was related to him in the year 1801, by the French ambassador, and thought it extremely curious and remarkable.
This circumstance also occasioned Madame Buo- Bonaparte to be likened by her friends, to Latona, the mother of Apollo and Diana; by which appel- limitation she continued to be known, until gentlemen brought with him from England, as a present for her, a print from Mr West's picture of Cornelia, the mother of the Gi'acchi, showing her children as jewels.
This latter circumstance united with the ardour shown by the young Buonaparte's for the emancipation of their country from the yoke of the old French despotism, occasioned her former name of Latona, to be changed to that of the Mother of the Gracchi. It has been said that the name of Napoleon was given to the newborn infant of Madame Buonaparte, according to a common custom among Catholics; viz. that of naming the child after the saint on whose festival it is baptized, and that the 16th of August, the day of young Buonaparte's baptism, was the festival of St. Napoleon, a saint then peculiar to Corsica.
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