I think the key to understanding who Napoleon really was can be discerned by his intense preoccupation with his stepdaughter. He fell in love with Josephine. He married her and realized that Josephine wasn’t that great a match for him. Then to his horror, her daughter grew up to become his ideal woman. What Napoleon did about this shows who he really was and it forms a lot of the tension behind his story.
Learn more about this mysterious relationship here.
Hortense had three sons named Napoleon. Napoleon asked the Pope to baptize her second Napoleon since the Pope was in town at the time.
Hortense’s memoirs are available here.
