The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI by Ariel Durant, Will Durant instant download

The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization, Volume XI by Ariel Durant, Will Durant instant download

This vision roused us from our septuaocto- genarian lassitude to a reckless resolve to turn our amateur scholarship to picturing that exciting and eventful age as a living whole. And shall we confess it?—we had nurtured from our adolescence a sly, fond interest in Napoleon as no mere warmonger and despot, but as also a philosopher seldom deceived by pretense, and as a psychologist who had ceaselessly studied human nature in the mass and in individual men. One of us was rash enough to give ten lectures on Napoleon in 1921. For sixty years we have been gathering material about him, so that some of our references will be to books once helpful and now dead. So here it is, a labor of five years, needing a lifetime; a book too long in total, too short and inadequate in every part; only the fear of that lurking Reaper made us call a halt. We pass it on, not to specialist scholars, who will learn nothing from it, but our friends, wherever they are, who have been patient with us through many years, and who may find in it some moment’s illumination or brightening fantasy.------