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    The Coronation of Napoleon I
    The Coronation of Napoleon I
    The Coronation of Napoleon I
    Ebook46 pages46 minutes

    The Coronation of Napoleon I

    By Steve Weinberg

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    If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? This ancient philosophical question is not typically associated with Napoleon’s Coronation Day. But perhaps it should be. With the twenty-first century now firmly underway, the meaning, purpose, and raison d’être for life has been repeatedly, violently, relentlessly undermined from all sides. It is said today, quite routinely, that our universe has been around for 13 billion years and that, indeed, the sun is just one of billions of stars in our galaxy, and that our galaxy is just one of billions in the universe. Still more, it is said that each one of these innumerable stars has its own set of planets, leaving our Earth as, to put it gently, just one of many. Indeed, as Freud posited, mankind has suffered three cruel blows upon its “naïve self-love” in modern times. The first came from Copernicus, who showed that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather “only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable.” The second came from Darwin, who theorized that the human species did not have the “peculiar privilege” of having been specially created, but had instead descended from “the animal world.” And the third insufferable blow, Freud proudly stated, had come from himself and his theory that man is not even “master of his own house,” and must live in ignorance of the powerful unconscious forces that motivate his everyday actions.
    With this backdrop in mind, the Coronation of Napoleon I, the grandest day Europe has ever known, begins to seem trivial and insignificant. It is naturally presumed that a day of such fanfare, jubilation, pomp, and historical importance is, in fact, an inherently special day. But, if Coronation Day were to be put under a microscope, we might find the moment robbed of its preciousness, aimless rather than select. The Eiffel Tower, the Musée du Louvre, and the epithet “City of Love,” all seem forever inseparable from Paris itself. But perhaps this “Paris” is a veneer, behind which is nothing more than a landmass with unimpressive hills, traversed by a meandering river, all resting rather stably atop a vast tectonic plate. In the same manner, it appears God-given that Napoleon Bonaparte was intrinsically greater than other men, and that his title of Emperor of France is as unchallengeable as Newton’s Third Law. But on the other hand, to reference Darwin above, Napoleon is perhaps less a preordained Übermensch than just another “descendant” from the animal kingdom.
    Immanuel Kant, the greatest philosopher of the German Enlightenment, developed an epistemological theory which speaks to this question. Kant held that the human mind, as it experiences the world, is working actively, tirelessly, to construct meaning from sensory input which is otherwise adrift, purposeless, and nonsensical. The implication here is, of course, that the world does not contain categorical meaning, but that significance only arises when our minds experience this free-floating stimuli and instinctively construct purpose to it. In short, if a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, it does not make a sound.
    “The Coronation of Napoleon I,” however, offers an alternative. As it takes its reader through the magnificent day of Napoleon’s Coronation, the short story examines this legendary crowning from a multitude of perspectives. By the end of the tale, one might become persuaded (or perhaps not), that the joyous cries and triumphant music coming from Notre-Dame Cathedral, Paris, on the Second of December, 1804, did, in fact, echo to all corners of the cosmos, even if the mere sounds themselves never extended beyond the city’s borders.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSteve Weinberg
    Release dateJun 16, 2015
    ISBN9781311486066
    The Coronation of Napoleon I
    Author

    Steve Weinberg

    The anxiety of the blank page. Where do I begin? I suppose at the beginning. I was born on December 12, 1985, in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside of Philadelphia. I went to a diverse, public high school known as Cheltenham High School. My affinity for literature began there. I was one of those students who reads Catcher in the Rye and believes that he is living a parallel life to Holden Caulfield. The Catcher in the Rye, though, stopped being my favorite book shortly into college. I attended Carnegie Mellon University, where I majored in English and History, and minored in Philosophy. While in college, I discovered existential literature, specifically the writings of Kafka, Camus, and Dostoevsky. When I graduated college in 2008, one of my immediate goals was to write a novel. It bothered me that I had spent my college years adulating other writers but had not produced anything of my own. I took a trip to Israel that summer on Birthright. I recall having tremendous anxiety during the trip, and the only method of calming down my mind was to think of ideas for a novel. After not more than a few hours of thinking, I stumbled on an idea. I would write a semi-autobiographical novel based on my college semester abroad in the South of France. I took a year off after college and wrote the first draft of the novel, titled The Test. I then began law school at Temple University in 2009. Throughout my three years of law school, in addition to constant studying, I fine-tuned my novel, at last finishing it at the age of 26. After law school, I began working at a law firm in Philadelphia. When time would allow, I wrote the lengthy short story, "The Coronation of Napoleon I." I then chose to take a break from law to teach English in Israel. For the 2014-15 school year, I worked in an elementary school in Be'er Sheva, Israel, teaching the English language and American culture to Israeli schoolchildren. I do not know where I will be in five years, or even five months. I hope that I continue to publish on Smashwords, and that the next biography of me will be significantly longer than this one, more expensive, and written by someone other than myself.

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      Book preview

      The Coronation of Napoleon I - Steve Weinberg

      THE CORONATION OF NAPOLEON I

      By Steve Weinberg

      ***

      Published by:

      Steve Weinberg at Smashwords

      Copyright © 2015 by Steve Weinberg

      ****

      All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

      This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

      Smashwords Edition Licence Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      ****

      Notre-Dame is covered in snow, obscured by a curtain of heavy fog and fitful white mist. It is the morning of December 2, 1804. Coronation Day.

      Since 1250, Notre-Dame had been the tallest building in Paris. It is true that, in 1679, Louis XIV had built L’Hôtel national des Invalides, which he and his administration heralded as Paris’ new tallest building. But in the minds of Parisians, Notre-Dame was and always would be the tallest. For it was Notre-Dame which sat on Île de la Cité, and which had towered over the city since the Middle Ages. For all of those centuries, it had watched over the bridges, the river, the narrow side streets, the black sticky mud which was always everywhere, the barges and laundry boats, the churches and the Palais du Louvre, and the thousands of lampposts with their strong, smoky oil.

      But standing atop Montmartre in search of the Gothic cathedral on this snowy morning, one might miss it. The sky was grey, the white snow was swirling everywhere, and the cathedral was lost in the clouds, its silver-white spires and stony gargoyles buried by the storm. Immersed in a near-blizzard like this, Paris became indistinguishable from a hundred other cities. It could have been anywhere. From atop Montmartre, one could have been looking down on Bruges, Boston, Copenhagen, or Milan, were they subject to a similar or worse winter blast. Only the topography of Paris remained intact from this view. Of course, one clearly saw the river looping and curving through the region. But the arc of the river Seine alone was not enough to mark the city. There were the two great islands of Paris as well, the Île de la Cîté and the Île Saint-Louis. But, at least from this height and in this weather, a man really only noticed the contours of these islands. In this snowstorm, these shapes caused a man to think more of an archipelago than of the eternal abodes of the bronze equestrian statue of Henry IV and L’église Saint-Louis-en-l’Île. So the eye, with nothing manmade to focus on, was drawn again and again to the winding, twisting, serpentine river Seine, which continued to bend and curl long past the borders of the city—wherever those borders may be. The river traveled on and on, into distant suburbs of unfamiliar towns called Argenteuil, Savignies, and Chamarande. If one looked far enough though, even the river became lost, and one was left with

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