LIEUTENANT PUSS IN BOOTS

In the previous post, I mentioned Napoleon Bonaparte as a prodigy and prospective aspie.

During his teens, the young Corsican lieutenant obsessed himself with pharaohs, firearms, and The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He could rather be found in the public library than in the tavern, all alone and reading a book than drinking brandy and playing cards in the company of his fellow officers.
The teenage Napoleon was a reserved and aloof young officer, lacking social skills, but eager to know more.
He would have been considered the regimental "nerd" nowadays.

Portrait of a young student lieutenant.

And here he is in full uniform, rapier sheathed, wig beneath his tricorn!

His fragile and effeminate appearance also contributed to Lieutenant Bonaparte's reputation as an aloof loner, frequently compared to a then-popular fairy tale character: he earned the sobriquet of Le Lieutenant Chat-Botté (pronounced "le lyöt-NAA SHA bot-TEE"): "Lieutenant Puss In Boots".
In love, he was obviously a shrinking violet. And his first love, Caroline-Louise de Colombier, who bestowed upon him the nickname of "Puss in Boots", was equally shy.

Prussian novelist Luise Mühlbach wrote, in the nineteenth century, a biography of Josephine that included also the life of her consort. When this story takes place, Napoleon is sixteen, stationed in Valence, and already considered one of the local outsiders:

Lieutenant Bonaparte memorial in downtown Valence.

"A life of labor and study, of hopes and dreams, now began for the young lieutenant. He gave himself up entirely to his military service, and pursued earnest, scientific studies in regard to it. Mathematics, the science of war, geometry, and finally politics, were the objects of his zeal; but alongside of these he read and studied earnestly the works of Voltaire, Corneille, Racine, Montaigne, the Abbe Raynal, and, above all, the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose passionate and enthusiastic disciple Napoleon Bonaparte was at that time. 

Amid so many grave occupations of the mind it would seem that the heart with all its claims had to remain in the background. The smiling boy Cupid, with his gracious raillery and his smarting griefs, seemed to make no impression on that pale, grave, and taciturn artillery lieutenant, and not to dare shoot an arrow toward that bosom which had mailed itself in an impenetrable cuirass of misanthropy, stoicism, and learning.

But yet between the links of this coat-of-mail an arrow must have glided, for the young lieutenant suddenly became conscious that there in his bosom a heart did beat, and that it was going in the midst of his studies to interrupt his dreams of misanthropy. Yes. it had come to this, that he abandoned his study to pay his court to a young lady, that at her side he lost his gravity of mien, his gloomy taciturnity, and became joyous, talkative, and merry, as beseemed a young man of his age.

The young lady who exercised so powerful an influence upon the young Bonaparte was the daughter of the commanding officer at Valence, M. de Colombier. He loved her, but his lips were yet too timid to confess it, and of what need were words to these young people to understand one another and to know what the one felt for the other?

In the morning they took long walks through the beautiful park; they spoke one to another of their childhood, of their brothers and sisters...
The sweet idyl of his first love had, however, come to a sudden and unexpected end. The young Second-Lieutenant Bonaparte was ordered to Lyons with his regiment, and the first innocent romance of his heart was ended.

But he never forgot the young maid, whom he then had so tenderly loved, and in the later days of his grandeur he remembered her, and when he learned that she had lost her husband, a M. de Bracieux, and lived in very depressing circumstances, he appointed her maid of honor to his sister Elise, and secured her a very handsome competency."

This is the first post of the series about prodigies and early misconceptions about savants and aspies that I have now started. As an aspie, I feel both alarmed and surprised by all prejudices, both for and against my kin, that have historically existed.