Dark Deeds Indeed...

That Napoleon I was something else...how on earth can such a man be so admired??? It's like saying Alexander The Great was a nice geezer... Nicole has sent me a 'tidbit' about the treatment of poor Pope Pius VII, sometimes even very seriously ill, by the French Emperor...find below. Thank heavens for my beloved history teacher who opens my eyes to such things. Off to find out more. I'm agog:

In the late spring of 1812, there occurred in Italy and France one of the great sacrileges of history. Pope Pius VII (left), who had been held a prisoner at Savona near Genoa by the Emperor Napoleon I since 1809, was cruelly dragged over the Alps, in precarious health, to Fontainebleau in France. The Pope arrived at the gates of Fontainebleau Castle nearly a corpse.

Shortly before the Pope's journey, Napoleon had written to Prince Borghese at Turin: ''Precautions will be taken to see that (Pius VII) passes through Turin at night ... that he passes through Chambery and Lyon at night. ... The Pope must not travel in his Pontifical robes ... (but) in such a way that nowhere ... can he be recognized.''

The Emperor's orders were executed with brutal precision. Clad in the black cassock of a common priest, the Supreme Pontiff was bundled into a carriage in the deep of night with only his quack doctor (provided by Napoleon) for a companion, and dispatched, already ill, northward to France. High in the Alps, his bowels became blocked, he could not urinate for days, and his agony, as the horses galloped on, was unbearable. Delirious with fever, the Pontiff cried out that he would throw himself on the road and die there if he were forced to go on.

And yet he was compelled to continue. As the Papal carriage was galloped through Lyon at midnight, the Pontiff gazed up at his physician and murmured of Napoleon, ''May God forgive him. I already have.'' It was miraculous that the Pope reached Fontainebleau alive.

He had been to Fontainebleau before - as Napoleon's guest eight years earlier when he first came to France to anoint and crown the Corsican parvenu Emperor of the French. By the time the Pope reached Paris, Napoleon had decided to crown himself, as the Pope sat by and watched, but despite the discourtesy the two men admired and liked each other - for a time. Soon enough they fell out, embroiled in a bitter quarrel over the respective powers of the kingdoms of Christ and Caesar. In 1809, the Pontiff was kidnapped from Rome by a young French general acting under the Emperor's instructions to ''shut (the Pope) up.''

Napoleon held Pius VII prisoner for nearly five years. Not content to be Emperor, Napoleon coveted the powers of the Papacy as well. To that end, he subjected the Pontiff to extraordinary trial and humiliation. Doses of morphine, for example, were administered by the Pope's quack doctor under the guise of sedatives, to induce the Pontiff to bow to the Emperor's demands. The Pope's entourage reported to Paris that at times the Pope was in a ''frenzy.''