Recollections of the Private Life of Napoleon — Complete

This is Napoleon as never seen before - not the emperor on his throne, not the general on the battlefield, but the man in his dressing gown. Louis Constant Wairy served as Napoleon's personal valet for fifteen years, and his memoir pulls back the curtain on the private life of history's most magnetic figure. Here is Napoleon eating breakfast, complaining about his wife Josephine, obsessively checking the time, demanding his trademark bicorne be perfectly positioned. Here too is the chaos of the imperial court, the rapid collapse after Waterloo, and the strange intimacy of serving a man who reshaped Europe. Wairy adored his master, and that loyalty gives the memoir its particular flavor - he admits Napoleon's flaws while insistently humanizing him. Written in 1830, just years after the Emperor's death, this is a primary document from a lost world. For anyone curious about how the legend actually lived, not how history remembers him.