Last night I headed out to The Diamond bar in Brooklyn for an evening of penis-themed entertainment featuring David Farley, author of An Irreverent Curiosity, and Tony Perrottet, author of Napoleon’s Privates.
I haven’t read the other book, Napoleon’s Privates, but the author talked about it a bit. Apparently Napoleon was extremely obnoxious to his surgeon, so when Napoleon died the surgeon got back at him by cutting off his private parts during the autopsy. Napoleon’s penis bounced around to different countries before finally ending up with a collector in New Jersey, where Tony Perrottet found it and surreptitiously made a replica, which he displayed last night. Another interesting fact he mentioned was that Napoleon was not in fact short. Napoleon’s height (5’6”) was pretty much average for his day. The idea that Napoleon was a shrimp seems to have been an invention of British propagandists.
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