Whenever I bump into Napoleon’s famous message to his lover, Joséphine de Beauharnais, I feel elated anew. “I will return in five days,” he wrote on horseback, as it were. “Stop washing.” For me, this is a sufficient proof of his greatness. And a positive proof that something has gone badly wrong with our civilization in the intervening two centuries. Napoleon would be impossible today, let alone his redolent lover.