Gertrude Aretz Bibliography

Suggest and discuss books to read (all languages welcome!)
Post Reply
LectorRecitator
Posts: 392
Joined: October 6th, 2018, 1:34 pm

Post by LectorRecitator »

GERTRUDE ARETZ (1889–1938)

Napoleon And His Women Friends (1927) · Translated by Eden Paul (1865–1944) & Cedar Paul (1880–1972)

ℹ️ "Men of mark must be handled in the same way as questions of primary importance. The study of them must be pursued into the most secret recesses of their intellectual and emotional life. Though in general the historian and the biographer are concerned with tracing such men’s influence upon their own time and upon subsequent generations, none the less the desire is widespread to learn their human peculiarities and weaknesses. People want to know them through and through; to learn their tastes and their passions, their faults and their vices as well as their merits and their virtues—for by these lights their actions can be more accurately appraised. The private life of a great man is public property, for the public shares in his sorrows and his joys, feels with him in his hours both of happiness and of unhappiness. We picture him in his home life, as husband and father, as lover and friend. Here is a man whose brain sketched titanic plans, whose mind was ever full of brilliant schemes for conquest, whose creative energy wore out his contemporaries. Is it not natural that we should ask ourselves how he reacted to the stresses of the tenderest, the noblest, and the most powerful of all our feelings—how he reacted towards love? What was his attitude to women? Was he brutal, despotic, unfeeling? Was he gentle, considerate, delicately sensitive? Or was he weak, submissive, irresolute; was he woman’s slave?" (Preface)

https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.17674/page/n5/mode/2up

https://archive.org/details/napoleonhiswomen0000gert/page/n7/mode/2up
Post Reply