The Golden Bees: The Story of the Bonapartes

This book is a domestic chronicle of the Bonaparte family, a greedy, amorous, quarrelsome and hot-blooded Corsican clan who provided nineteenth century Europe- and America- not only with two French emperors, but also with an assortment of pretenders, and parvenus, statesmen and eccentrics, great ladies and adventuresses. Plumped onto the thrones of Europe by the career of Napoleon I, who probably took better care of his family than any conqueror in history, the Bonapartes survived the wreck of the two empires they ruled, buzzing around the continent with all the tenacity of the imperial bees of Napoleon's crest.