Who knew Napoleon was such a regular guy?
Fr. George Rutler, host of the wonderful EWTN program Christ in the City, has just published a new book, Coincidentally: Unserious Reflections on Trivial Connections. Here's one example:
That morose day of Napoleon’s surrender…witnessed one of history’s grandest homophonic sentences, a homophone being, we might say, a verbal coincidence….Napoleon stood silent on the deck for a painful while and then muttered with resignation: "Cast off, it is time to go." Only the Corsican said it in his accented French which he had learned at the age of ten: "A l’eau, c’est l’heure." A young British sailor standing on deck knew not the gilded tongue of mankind’s golden race. Under the impression that the fallen emperor was speaking English, the sailor was flattered by what he mistook for familiarity and later reported that Napoleon had the courtesy to address him, "Hello, sailor."
H/T NRO