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The Cook/The Large Man
Napoleon Bonaparte, husband to Joséphine, is the Corsican-born military and political leader of France who inspires first passionate devotion and then disillusioned, obsessive hatred in French villager and army recruit Henri, who gets close to Napoleon after becoming the junior soldier who brings Napoleon his beloved roast chicken. Napoleon’s egotism and self-love are so powerful that they hypnotize the French people into loving him too. When in 1804 he crowns himself emperor of France, even his former critics among the French peasantry are happy to have him as a monarch— though they recently fought revolutionary wars to overthrow the French monarchy. Yet his disastrous 1812 invasion of Russia leads to massive loss of life among both his own soldiers and the Russian peasantry, leading the formerly devoted Henri to become disillusioned with him and desert the army. In 1814, Napoleon is defeated and exiled to the Italian island of Elba. After a brief escape in 1815, he is recaptured and exiled to the British-controlled African island of Saint Helena, where he dies in 1821. After his death, his ghost haunts Henri during Henri’s imprisonment in the Venetian asylum San Servelo.
Napoleon Bonaparte Quotes in The Passion
The The Passion quotes below are all either spoken by Napoleon Bonaparte or refer to Napoleon Bonaparte. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Part 1: The Emperor Quotes
It was Napoleon who had such a passion for chicken that he kept his chefs working around the clock. What a kitchen that was, with birds in every state of undress[.]
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Words like devastation, rape, slaughter, carnage, starvation are lock and key words to keep the pain at bay. Words about war that are easy on the eye.
I’m telling you stories. Trust me.
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“Will you kill people, Henri?”
I dropped down beside her. “Not people, Louise, just the enemy.”
“What is enemy?”
“Someone who’s not on your side.”
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“What makes you think you can see anything clearly? What gives you the right to make a notebook and shake it at me in thirty years, if we’re still alive, and say you’ve got the truth?”
“I don’t care about the facts, Domino, I care about how I feel. How I feel will change. I want to remember that.”
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I wrote about her or tried to. She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.
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Soldiers and women. That’s how the world is. Any other role is temporary.
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Part 2: The Queen of Spades Quotes
Passion is not so much an emotion as a destiny. What choice have I in the face of this wind but to put up sail and rest my oars?
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Part 3: The Zero Winter Quotes
They called the Czar ‘the Little Father’, and they worshipped him as they worshipped God. In their simplicity I saw a mirror for my own longing and understood for the first time my own need for a little father that had led me this far.
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You can’t make sense of your passion for life in the face of death, you can only give up your passion. Only then can you begin to survive.
And if you refuse?
If you felt for every man you murdered [. . .] madness would throw her noose around your neck and lead you into the dark woods where the rivers are polluted and the birds are silent.
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If the love was passion, the hate will be obsession. A need to see the once-loved weak and cowed and beneath pity. Disgust is close and dignity is far away. The hate is not only for the once-loved, it’s for yourself too; how could you ever have loved this?
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Future. Crossed Out.
That’s what war does.
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“They’re all different.”
“What?”
“Snowflakes. Think of that.”
I did think of that and I fell in love with her.
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What you risk reveals what you value.
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Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?
Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.
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I say I’m in love with her. What does that mean?
It means I review my future and my past in the light of this feeling. It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read.
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Part 4: The Rock Quotes
They had notebooks with them mostly. His life-story, his feelings on the rock. They were going to make their fortunes exhibiting this lamed beast.
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I am in love with her; not a fantasy or a myth or a creature of my own making.
Her. A person who is not me. I invented Bonaparte as much as he invented himself.
My passion for her, even though she could never return it, showed me the difference between inventing a lover and falling in love.
The one is about you, the other about someone else.
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Get the entire The Passion LitChart as a printable PDF.
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Napoleon Bonaparte Character Timeline in The Passion
The timeline below shows where the character Napoleon Bonaparte appears in The Passion. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Part 1: The Emperor
Henri’s first job in the Napoleonic army is to strangle chickens for Napoleon’s meals. But, due to his short stature, he...
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...ringing demandingly. One man rushes to roast a chicken, and Henri carries the chicken to Napoleon’s tent. Napoleon—looking fearful—tells Henri to deposit the chicken and leave. Henri asks whether Napoleon wants...
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Even in the kitchen tent, the camp is freezing. Henri jokes that Napoleon is using the Russian winter like a larder to keep his chicken from spoiling. In...
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...where the cook decides he’s too skinny to chop meat and assigns him to strangling Napoleon’s chickens. Later, Henri wanders to the docks and falls asleep. The recruiting officer kicks Henri...
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...army, in the port of Boulogne, Henri and the others prepare to invade England with Napoleon, with whom all France is “in love.” One night, the cook insists on taking the...
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From an unspecified point in the future, Henri considers Napoleon Bonaparte’s life: born 1769, he exploited the tumultuous 1789 revolution to rise through the army...
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When Napoleon finally arrives in the Boulogne camp, a captain demands that Henri cook chickens. While Henri...
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...mocked by the other soldiers, the cook spits in Henri’s face and threatens him. Meanwhile, Napoleon is overseeing preparations to invade England. Since all the soldiers would have had to work...
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The army begins practicing on barges for their sea invasion of England. Napoleon estimates that 20,000 soldiers will die during the crossing, but neither he nor the soldiers...
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On July 20, 1804, the army parades, and Napoleon reviews them in preparation for a practice launch later in the day. Patrick tells Henri...
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...future and rarely mentioning his circus past. The other soldiers know, however, that he saved Napoleon’s wife, Joséphine, from being trampled by a horse after she barely survived the Terror (when...
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Despite Domino’s criticism, Henri keeps writing in his diary. Then, in August, Napoleon announces that he will be crowned in December and gives Henri leave to return home...
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...contemplating writing to her monarchist parents. Henri thinks: “We all had something to pin on Bonaparte.” Noticing his skepticism, his mother tells him that she’s simply happy to think about and...
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Henri travels to Paris for the coronation. There, he sees Napoleon and Joséphine spending enormous amounts of money on the preparations. Napoleon insists that Henri wear...
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Many banquets are held for the coronation. Though everyone else eats delicacies, Napoleon only eats chicken—and no one alludes to this fact. Paranoid about being poisoned, he starts...
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...hears about the tremendous coronation parties secondhand. In Boulogne, he trains hard and eats little. Napoleon sends sex workers to service the army. The women are poorly paid, poorly dressed, and...
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Part 2: The Queen of Spades
Napoleon takes Villanelle’s city in 1797. Subjugated, its citizens turn to “pleasure” and “excess” as consolation...
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...actual biological sex. One August, the city holds a ball in a piazza to celebrate Napoleon’s birthday, for which the Casino provides “booths of chance.” Villanelle puts on makeup, men’s clothes,...
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...woman with gray-green eyes—asks him how he gets his money. He explains that he supplies Napoleon’s army with large amounts of poor-quality meat. Villanelle allows him to buy her champagne. When...
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Part 3: The Zero Winter
...the enemy. Everyone is an enemy when you are a conqueror. Instead of invading England, Napoleon’s army went to fight “the Third Coalition” under terrible conditions. After two years, Napoleon and...
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Back in the present, years have passed since New Year’s 1805. Napoleon announces that as the Czar has broken their alliance, the French army will march on...
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...the Russians burn Moscow. When the French army camps outside the burning city, Henri prepares Napoleon a very thin chicken and realizes that he has begun to hate Napoleon and wants...
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...Either way, Henri has been at war for eight years and is still just cooking Napoleon’s chickens, so he feels that Domino’s sentiment is correct: “Future. Crossed out. That’s what war...
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...such a thing while in such dire straits. The three of them steal food from Napoleon, leave some for Domino, and flee.
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Henri, Villanelle, and Patrick journey on. Everywhere they encounter peasants who hate the French and Napoleon, who insulted their own leaders and took away their freedom. When in Poland, the travelers...
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...who died in the war. Given the obvious horror of battle deaths, he wonders how Napoleon recruited so many men and why so few deserted. Napoleon claimed that war was in...
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...exile who used to live in one of the formerly fancy houses they’re sailing past. Napoleon appropriated all her wealth and—it is rumored—gave her jewels to Joséphine.
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...army. He sees his reflection in the window and thinks that after eight years with Napoleon, “this was the face [he] had become.” Suddenly, he also sees reflected Villanelle cornered by...
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Part 4: The Rock
...the dead “on this rock,” though people claim the dead do not speak. He hears Napoleon, who died “on his rock.” After the Russians took Paris, they arrested Napoleon. Napoleon waited...
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When Napoleon was exiled to an island the first time, he felt like he had regained his...
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...Mary sewn by Villanelle’s mother. The asylum used to be for rich patients only, but Napoleon opened it to rich and poor patients, and the grounds are now quite rundown. No...
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...what would happen if someone had ever returned his passion—his passion which first landed on Napoleon, who later proved “unworthy” and turned Henri’s passion to hatred. She speculates, too, that killing...
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“Après moi, le deluge.” Pondering this phrase, Henri thinks that, strangely enough, Napoleon was fooled by his own myth. The French turmoil barely affects him in Venice. Henri...
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...past his death: “I like to know that life will outlive me, that’s a happiness Bonaparte never understood.”
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...still loves Villanelle—for herself, not a “myth” he himself fashioned the way he did with Napoleon. He believes that his passion for her showed him true love, which is “about someone...
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