[The Origins of Contemporary France<br> Volume 5 (of 6) by Hippolyte A. Taine]@TWC D-Link book
The Origins of Contemporary France
Volume 5 (of 6)

CHAPTER II
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"The spasm was generally shared by the stomach and the bladder.

If in the stomach, he had a nervous cough which exhausted his moral and physical energies." Such was the case between the eve of the battle of Moscow and the morning after his entry into Moscow: "a constant dry cough, difficult and intermittent breathing; the pulse sluggish, weak, and irregular; the urine thick and sedimentary, drop by drop and painful; the lower part of the legs and the feet extremely oedematous." Already, in 1806, at Warsaw, "after violent convulsions in the stomach," he declared to the Count de Loban, "that he bore within him the germs of a premature death, and that he would die of the same disease as his father's." (De Segur, VI., 82.) After the victory of Dresden, having eaten a ragout containing garlic, he is seized with such violent gripings as to make him think he was poisoned, and he makes a retrograde movement, which causes the loss of Vandamme's division, and, consequently, the ruin of 1813.

"Souvenirs", by Pasquier, Etienne-Dennis, duc, chancelier de France.

Librarie Plon, Paris 1893, (narrative of Daru, an eye-witness.)--This susceptibility of the nerves and stomach is hereditary with him and shows itself in early youth.

"One day, at Brienne, obliged to drop on his knees, as a punishment, on the sill of the refectory, he is seized with sudden vomiting and a violent nervous attack." De Segur, I., 71 .-- It is well known that he died of a cancer in the stomach, like his father Charles Bonaparte.


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