In Napoleon Bonaparte's novella, triumphant soldier Clisson turns his back on worldly success. He falls in love and marries Eugenie, and they live the simple life until Clisson is called back into battle.

The tragic story of Clisson and Eugenie reveals that Napoleon was also an accomplished writer of fiction, and offers a fascinating insight into how he viewed love, women, and military life.

Aged twenty-six, having already known success as a soldier, Napoleon was at a low ebb both professionally and personally when he began "Clisson and Eugenie," and there are parallels between his life and their story.

Spurred by a lifelong fascination with the great emperor, French novelist Honore de Balzac set himself the pains taking task of collecting a selection of Napoleon's aphorisms from his public speeches and the gazettes of the time. Arranged into four themes (covering social life, the military arts, the exercise of power and the teachings of experience and misfortune), Napoleon's pithy pills of wisdom - often Machiavellian, cynical, dry and sometimes cruel - offer a unique insight into the mind of a man who prided himself on preferring action over thought and the sword over the pen, and conjure up one of the most eminent and influential historical figures of all time.

This is a new release of the original 1928 edition.