Also available in: Italian

There has been gossip circulating on account of the great French leader Napoleon Bonaparte for quite some time, one of biggest is that he was known to be very small .

Historians agree that he was 168 cm tall, three centimeters more than the average French man of the time, therefore, for the time he had a height of respect.

This slander could have come by the British who wanted to downplay his reputation on the battlefields.

There has been another rumor floating around concerning the theft of the Mona Lisa . The well-known painting was probably already in France in 1517 where Leonardo had brought it and later was bought by Francis I . Napoleon was limited to hang it in the room of his wife Josephine and later the work of art became an integral part of the permanent collection at the Louvre, at the time called the Napoleon Museum.

His portraits often depict him with his hand in vest simply because it was the custom of the eighteenth and nineteenth century portrayed in this way men and not because he had stomach pains.

He was given credit for being an innovator as he “invented” the food in a box used to feed the soldiers in military campaigns. In fact it was the merit of the pastry chef Francois Nicolas Appert who invented the cooking of food in sealed glass jars.

One of his officers found the Rosetta Stone, a granite table in which there are inscriptions in hieroglyphics translated into greek and allowed linguists to translate the hieroglyphs opening the way to the discovery of ancient Egypt.

Another original rumor is that which sees him suffer Ailurophobia , the fear of cats, but as claimed by the historical Katharine MacDonogh in his book “History of the dogs and cats at the court of the times of the Renaissance” there is no evidence that Napoleon was suffering from this phobia . I wonder how many Europeans are superstitious and stay away from black cats?

Picture: biografieonline.it