In Search of Two Characters; Some Intimate Aspects of Napoleon and his Son
London: Readers Union with Macmillan, 1947. Book Club Edition. Presumed first printing thus. Hardcover. viii, [4], 402, [2] pages. Synopsis of Napoleon's Career. Authorities and Works Consulted. Index. Endpapers discolored. Some cover wear and soiling. Some page creasing and discoloration. Dormer Creston was the penname of Dorothy Julia Colston-Baynes, the daughter of an English baronet. Enter a Child is her autobiography; she was an unusually sensitive child who had to please impossibly demanding Victorian parents. She had strong aesthetic urges that were completely misunderstood and ignored by her relatives, much like Lord Berners in his own memoir First Childhood. Everything their daughter does is wrong by their lights, and she rarely understands why. Baynes does a good job of pulling you into the viewpoint of a innocent child placed in the middle of rigid, dictatorial adults who labor under a maelstrom of neurosis. In many ways, Enter a Child is a book about a daughter of a baronet who suffered a great deal from her excessively rigid family. Enter a Child is a good book that ought to be better known than it is. Napoleon II (Napoléon François Joseph Charles Bonaparte; 20 March 1811 – 22 July 1832) was the disputed Emperor of the French for a few weeks in 1815. He was the son of Emperor Napoleon I and Empress Marie Louise, daughter of Emperor Francis I of Austria. Napoleon II had been Prince Imperial of France and King of Rome since birth. After the fall of his father, he lived the rest of his life in Vienna and was known in the Austrian court as Franz, Duke of Reichstadt for his adult life (from the German version of his second given name, along with a title his grandfather granted him in 1818). He was posthumously given the nickname L'Aiglon ("the Eaglet") after the popular Edmond Rostand play, L'Aiglon. When Napoleon I tried to abdicate on 4 April 1814, he said that his son would rule as emperor. However, the coalition victors refused to acknowledge his son as successor, and Napoleon I was forced to abdicate unconditionally some days later. Although Napoleon II never actually ruled France, he was briefly the titular Emperor of the French after the second fall of his father. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 21. His cousin, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, founded the Second French Empire in 1852 and ruled as Emperor Napoleon III. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Napoleon, Josephine, Marie Louise, King of Rome, Duke of Reichstadt, Prince Imperial, L'Aiglon, Eaglet, Abdication, Beauharnais, General Bertrand, General Gourgaud, Hudson Lowe, Comte de Las Cases, Comte de Montholon, Laure Permon, Talleyrand
[Book #87995]
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