Scatter Brained

C H A P T E R   5

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S C A T T E R B R A I N E D
duel at the ripe old age of 20. Here’s the crazy part, though: 
Some believe that Galois 
staged
 the duel to look like a police 
ambush, in hopes that his death might incite a democratic 
revolution. (Talk about delusions of grandeur.) Mathemati-
cians were awfully political back then. For example, Galois’s 
former mentor, Joseph “Numbers” Fourier, traveled to Egypt 
with an infl uential fellow by the name of . . .
11
 Napoléon Bonaparte
Let’s clear this up once and for all: Napoléon could not possi-
bly have had a “Napoléon complex,” at least not in the classi-
cal sense of the phrase, because he wasn’t short. He was 5'6½", 
making him an inch and a half taller than the average Euro-
pean of his day.
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  ere may be other reasons why they called him the “Little 
Corporal.” It seems likely that the priest present during Na-
poléon’s autopsy made off  with the Little Corporal’s Little 
Corporal, if you catch our drift. Th
  is relic of Napoléon has 
changed hands several times and is now owned by an Ameri-
can urologist. But to answer your question: When the item 
was put on display in the late 1920s, newspaper reports said 
it was an inch long and compared it to a “shriveled eel.”
✖  ✖  ✖
Th
  ings didn’t go terribly well for Napoléon’s descendants, ei-
ther. His only son died, apparently of heart failure, at 21. 
Napoléon III, who was actually Napoléon’s nephew, not his 
grandson, managed to become Emperor of France—but he 
died in exile after losing the Franco-Prussian War. But the 

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Napoléon’s Dynamite!
MY RÉSUMÉ, BY NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE