This was no ordinary hunger. It felt as if all the emptiness in the universe had been stuffed into her stomach.
"I can't take it anymore!" her partner said.
God, John Lennon, they were all dead. In short, we planned to run toward evil.
With kitchen knives in our hands, we walked toward the bakery.
—Haruki Murakami
In 1795, while ordinary French people still trembled uneasily beneath the shadow left by the Reign of Terror, fearing that someone even more brutal than Robespierre might come to power, and while the National Convention argued endlessly over France's republican system and new constitution, twenty-six-year-old Napoleon Bonaparte wandered the streets of Paris in poverty and despair, heartbroken over a failed romance.
According to the Marquise of Abrantes, he had looked dreadful during that period: unkempt, with messy hair and poorly applied face powder, unpleasant to look at. When he entered the courtyard of the Peace Inn where he lived, an old bowler hat was pulled down over his head, revealing only his eyes and a pair of drooping doglike ears. He wore an old-fashioned long coat, and his black, thin hands were bare because he often said gloves were a waste of money. His boots were shabby and unpolished, his body gaunt, his complexion waxen, and he looked sickly all over. No matter how one looked at him, he did not resemble a great man.
Paris was known as the city of romance. Although Napoleon was Corsican, his attitude toward love was as resolute and intensely romantic as any Frenchman's. This sort of romance did not mean casually bringing home a bouquet for one's wife or lover after passing a flower shop, nor did it mean saying, "I'd do anything for you," or spending money to put on a show.
No one wanted