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* As Washington ended his second term, he contemplated emancipating all his slaves – yet never did while he doggedly also pursued escapees: Oona Judge was a young mixed-race maid, a favourite of George and Martha, but in May 1796, knowing that the Washingtons were returning and fearing she would never be manumitted, she escaped. Martha was upset – ‘The blacks are so bad in their nature, they have not the least gratitude for the kindness showed to them’ – and the couple were convinced that she had been ‘seduced by a Frenchman’. Washington ordered his treasury secretary to use customs officials to kidnap her in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Instead Oona persuaded the customs official that she had not been seduced and would return if she was promised manumission. Any such deal, said Washington, was ‘inadmissible’ and he tried one more time to capture her. Finally he stopped, fearing bad publicity, at which the brave Oona insisted, ‘I am now free now and choose to remain so.’ On 14 December 1799 Washington died aged sixty-seven, leaving 317 persons to Martha. They were finally manumitted in Martha’s will.

* When Pitt accused an MP of obstructing the defence of the realm, he was challenged to a duel. On 27 May 1898 the men fought at Putney Heath. No one was harmed, but he was not the last premier to fight a duel.

* Bonaparte cultivated the legend of his Olympian acumen and sleepless energy – ‘Different subjects and different affairs are arranged in my head like a cupboard; when I wish to interrupt one train of thought, I shut that drawer and open another. If I wish to sleep, I close all the drawers and I sleep.’ His talents varied from a logistical mastery and tactical virtuosity to a personal touch with his grognards (veterans) that won him longstanding loyalty. He revelled in his new power: when the king of Sweden sent him Fersen, Queen Antoinette’s lover, as an envoy, he told the Swede he was ‘mocking the first nation of the world’. Later raised to marshal of the Swedish court, Fersen, entangled in the fall of the Vasa dynasty, was stomped to death by a mob in 1810.

* On the way home, Dumas was captured by papal forces and imprisoned; his health broken, he retired. His son was Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte-Cristo; his grandson the younger Alexander wrote La Dame aux camélias.

* The expedition’s most lasting effect was archaeological. In July 1798, just after their arrival, Bonaparte’s scientists discovered at Rosetta a stele of Ptolemy V, engraved in three languages – Greek, hieroglyphic and demotic – that, later handed to the British, allowed the translation of hieroglyphic, opening up the study of ancient Egyptian writing.

* Toussaint warned Bonaparte, ‘In overthrowing me, you’ve done no more than cut down the trunk of the tree of black liberty in Saint-Domingue. It will spring back from the roots, for they are numerous and deep.’ He begged Bonaparte to free his wife Suzanne, but he never saw her or his sons again. While they were kept in captivity, Toussaint and Mars Plaisir were imprisoned in the Fort de Joux, a medieval fortress in the Jura Mountains, where Bonaparte systematically destroyed him: no contact with his family, no visitors, no reading materials, no medical care. Leclerc was terrified that he would escape to ‘set the colony alight’. Bonaparte sent an aide who reported that the prisoner was ‘self-possessed, cunning and skilful’. As Toussaint’s health collapsed, he felt himself ‘buried alive’ but managed to dictate a testament, justifying his policies, pointing out that no ‘white general’ would have been treated like this: ‘Does the colour of my skin get in the way of my honour and bravery?’ But the winter was cruel: in April 1803, he was found dead in his cell.

* Bonaparte ordered Pauline to return to ‘the consolation in the love of your family’, but she was ‘a less than desolate widow’. Proud of her dynasty and beauty (Canova made the plaster cast of her breasts which can be seen in the Museo Napoleonico, Rome), she was determined to live passionately. Napoleon arranged her marriage to a feckless Roman aristocrat, Prince Camillo Borghese – ‘an imbecile’, she thought – whom she cuckolded wildly. Her brother tried to restrain her, advising, ‘She should not indulge in these bad manners.’

* Jefferson was later tempted by Cuba. ‘I cordially confess’, he wrote, ‘that I have ever looked upon Cuba as the most interesting addition that could ever be made to our system of States.’