PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD MENTIONED IN WALDEN AND IN CAPE COD: NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE ON HEROES, HERO-WORSHIP, AND THE HEROIC IN HISTORY by Thomas Carlyle: I. The Hero as Divinity. Odin. Paganism: Scandinavian Mythology. II. The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam. III. The Hero as Poet. Dante; Shakspeare. IV. The Hero as Priest. Luther; Reformation: Knox; Puritanism. V. The Hero as Man of Letters. Johnson, Rousseau, Burns. VI. The Hero as King. Cromwell, Napoleon: Modern Revolutionism. “NARRATIVE HISTORY” AMOUNTS TO FABULATION, THE REAL STUFF BEING MERE CHRONOLOGY People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN WALDEN: The last inhabitant of these woods before me was an Irishman, PEOPLE OF Hugh Quoil, (if I have spelt his name with coil enough,) who occupied WALDEN Wyman’s tenement, –Col. Quoil, he was called. Rumor said that he had been a soldier at Waterloo. If he had lived I should have made him fight his battles over again. His trade here was that of a ditcher. Napoleon went to St. Helena; Quoil came to Walden Woods. All I know of him is tragic. He was a man of manners, like one who has seen the world, and was capable of more civil speech than you could well attend to. He wore a great coat in mid-summer, being affected with the trembling delirium, and his face was the color of carmine. He died in the road at the foot of Brister’s Hill shortly after I came to the woods, so that I have not remembered him as a neighbor. Before his house was pulled down, when his comrades avoided it as “an unlucky castle,” I visited it. There lay his old clothes curled up by use, as if they were himself, upon his raised plank bed. His pipe lay broken on the hearth, instead of a bowl broken at the fountain. The last could never have been the symbol of his death, for he confessed to me that, though he had heard of Brister’s Spring, he had never seen it; and soiled cards, kings of diamonds spades and hearts, were scattered over the floor. One black chicken which the administrator could not catch, black as night and as silent, not even croaking, awaiting Reynard, still went to roost in the next apartment. In the rear there was the dim outline of a garden, which had been planted but had never received its first hoeing, owing to those terrible shaking fits, thought it was now harvest time. It was over-run with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks, which last stuck to my clothes for all fruit. The skin of a woodchuck was freshly stretched upon the back of the house, a trophy of his last Waterloo; but no warm cap or mittens would he want more. NAPOLEON HUGH QUOIL ST. HELENA HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD WALDEN: What recommends commerce to me is its enterprise PEOPLE OF and bravery. It does not clasp its hands and pray to Jupiter. WALDEN I see these men every day go about their business with more or less courage and content, doing more even than they suspect, and perchance better employed that they could have consciously devised. I am less affected by their heroism who stood up for half an hour in the front line at Buena Vista, than by the steady and cheerful valor of the men who inhabit the snow-plough for their winter quarters; who have not merely the three-o’-clock in the morning courage, which Bonaparte thought was the rarest, but whose courage does not go to rest so early, who go to sleep only when the storm sleeps or the sinews of their iron steed are frozen. On this morning of the Great Snow, perchance, which is still raging and chilling men’s blood, I hear the muffled tone of their engine bell from out the fog bank of their chilled breath, which announces that the cars are coming, without long delay, notwithstanding the veto of a New England north-east snow storm, and I behold the ploughmen covered with snow and rime, their heads peering above the mould-board which is turning down other than daisies and the nests of field-mice, like bowlders of the Sierra Nevada, that occupy an outside place in the universe. NAPOLEON BONAPARTE THE GREAT SNOW HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN CAPE COD : When I approached this house the next summer, over the PEOPLE OF desolate hills between it and the shore, which are worthy to have been the birthplace of Ossian, I saw the wizard in the midst of CAPE COD a cornfield on the hillside, but, as usual, he loomed so strangely, that I mistook him for a scarecrow. This was the merriest old man that we had ever seen, and one of the best preserved. His style of conversation was coarse and plain enough to have suited Rabelais. He would have made a good Panurge. Or rather he was a sober Silenus, and we were the boys Chromis SILENUS and Mnasilus, who listened to his story. CHROMIS “Not by Hæmonian hills the Thracian bard, MNASILUS Nor awful Phœbus was on Pindus heard With deeper silence or with more regard.” There was a strange mingling of past and present in his conversation, for he had lived under King George, and might have remembered when Napoleon and the moderns generally were born. He said that one day, when the troubles between the Colonies and the mother country first broke out, as he, a boy of fourteen, was pitching hay out of a cart, one Doane, an old Tory, who was talking with his father, a good Whig, said to him, “Why, Uncle Bill, you might as well undertake to pitch that pond into the ocean with a pitchfork, as for the Colonies to undertake to gain their independence.” He remembered well General Washington, and how he rode his horse along the streets of Boston, and he stood up to show us how he looked. “He was a r–a–ther large and portly-looking man, a manly and resolute-looking officer, with a pretty good leg as he sat on his horse.” –“There, I’ll tell you, this was the way with Washington.” Then he jumped up again, and bowed gracefully to right and left, making show as if he were waving his hat. Said he, “That was Washington.” He told us many anecdotes of the Revolution, and was much pleased when we told him that we had read the same in history, and that his account agreed with the written. “O,” he said, “I know, I know! I was a young fellow of sixteen, with my ears wide open; and a fellow of that age, you know, is pretty wide awake, and likes to know everything that’s going on. O, I know!” OSSIAN JOHN DRYDEN KING GEORGE NAPOLEON HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD 1769 August 8, Tuesday: Charles Messer noticed that a great comet had appeared in Aries. This one would be growing a truly enormous (for an approaching comet; tails of receding comets can be quite a bit longer) tail of not less than 43 degrees as it plunged past the earth toward the sun. SKY EVENT August 15, Tuesday: Napoleone di Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio, Corsica to Marie-Letizia and Carlo Buonaparte. The family was wealthy, by Corsican standards, and of the local nobility. By virtue of the family’s relentless social climbing –which would include his mother’s adultery with Corsica’s military governor, the Comte de Marbeuf– the lad would in 1779 be able to enter the French military academy at Brienne. NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT September 10, Sunday: Messer’s comet came as close as it would come to Earth, 0.35 astronomical units. Pingre, who was aboard ship between Teneriffe and Cadiz, alleged that the tail was 90 degrees in length, but acknowledged that at the end of the tail it was so tenuous that the competitive light brought by the rise of Venus above the horizon made several degrees at the end of it no longer visible. SKY EVENT What might this mean? October 8, Sunday: Messer’s comet whipped around the sun at a distance of 0.12 astronomical units. SKY EVENT October 26, Thursday: Messer’s comet was again visible as it rose away from the sun. SKY EVENT People of Cape Cod and Walden “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN WALDEN December 3, Sunday: Last sighting of Messer’s Comet, by telescope. Napoleone di Bonaparte would come to be of the opinion, and Charles Messer would of course concur, that this comet had been a celestial sign of his birth. SKY EVENT HDT WHAT? INDEX PEOPLE OF CAPE COD AND WALDEN:NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN CAPE COD 1779 Benjamin Franklin was appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to France.1 At 10 years of age, Napoleone di Bonaparte obtained a place at the French military academy at Brienne. This was due in part to the lad’s evident abilities, but it was also due in part to the relentlessness of the Buonaparte family of Corsica’s social climbing — climbing which had included his mother’s adultery with the Comte de Marbeuf, that island’s French military governor.