Because the Treaty of Amiens had been signed, many Britons came to France as tourists. Turner was one of them.
Painters recorded the scenery they saw through sketching from life, somewhat like photographs, yet different from them. Since beacon towers were not normally lit, and he wanted to see what they looked like when ablaze, he painted that scene into his picture. But that made the painting differ from reality.
Everyone who paid a painter for a portrait hoped to look a little better in it. Painters were not machines like cameras; they knew how to adapt. This was different from the subjective perception produced by the halo effect.
It was not easy to see a person clearly. Sometimes, you thought you understood someone, but in truth, they did not match your understanding of them.
Napoleon was not a perfect man. He was not omniscient or omnipotent. Even someone as intelligent as Isaac Newton made mistakes.
He excelled at military affairs, geometry, economics, politics, and law, yet he knew nothing about the textile industry. Chaptal, however, was an expert in that field. After all, his wife's family was in textiles. That morning, he had shown off his skills at a local workshop. The owner had kept complaining that the yarn was dyed unevenly, and Chaptal easily discovered that it was caused by unevenly twisted skeins. So the Minister of the Interior personally twisted one himself, leaving the workers present utterly stunned.
Bonaparte was delighted. Though he was often the star of the stage, he did not mind occasionally stepping down to become a spectator and applaud the actors onstage. At the time, no one noticed the problem Perrier had discovered.
Napoleon disliked merchants. He had brought the bankers along to encourage them to invest, but Perrier, who seemed so rational,