Napoleon was a Big Guy Really

Napoleon was actually a tall guy. Did you know that? It’s true. The legend that the great conqueror of Europe was severely vertically challenged is just that—a legend. Maybe not quite an urban myth—I don’t think they had those back then—but nevertheless, a myth. It illustrates, however, the mismatch between the French and Anglo-Saxon worlds. A Cultural Difference robbed Napoleon of nearly  six inches. When he died, of stomach cancer (they said) , his captors, the British, first had a death-mask made. This really was as much a way to prove that Boney was dead as anything else. Then they measured him. As one does. But the British didn’t measure him themselves, they asked the French doctor who had been attending the captive to do it. And the doctor, being French, used a French me