Napoleonic

   , WATERLOO

   Calling someone Napoleonic might refer to Napoleon's short and stocky build, his excessive and greedy loyalty to family, to the desire for power at any cost, or to overweening ambitions. Or it might refer to Napoleon's hair style or his pompous stance with his hand inside his shirt. Napoleon's name is sometime used to denote supremacy in a particular field as in a Napoleon of finance.

   Although there have been several Napoleons—Napoleon II (1811—1832), who never reigned; Napoleon III (1808-1873) of the Second Empire; and, of course, the incomparable Napoleon I (176 1821)—Napoleon Bonaparte's reign (1804-1815) is known in French history as the First Empire. Bonaparte's political, military, and personal life consisted of one legend after another. When only seventeen, he proposed marriage to the illegitimate daughter of Louis XV, who turned him down because he had "no future."

   One of his great accomplishments that has survived is the Code Napoleon, the code of laws prepared under his direction that forms the basis of modern French law and law in the state of Louisiana. Equality, justice, and common sense are its keynotes. But Napoleon is equally well remembered in the barroom by Napoleon brandy.

   Six years after Napoleon met his Waterloo in 1815, he died of cancer at age fifty-two while imprisoned on the island of St. Helena. (A Waterloo is a crushing or decisive defeat.) The devotion of many of his worshipers continues. In 1840, his body was enshrined in Paris in the Invalides, to which the people of the world still make a pilgrimage.