Napoleon Great-Great-Grandson Speaks

The book begins with the story of how Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in the house of Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu and governor of Odessa, in 1807. A brief liaison with the duke’s 19-year-old Italian servant girl, Luisa Ravelli, resulted in the birth of a son. The bombing of Odessa by an Anglo-French squadron in 1854 and the landing of French troops in Odessa in 1918 had the objective of finding that illegitimate son. The protagonist of the book, Yevgeny Rivilis, is Bonaparte’s great-great-grandson and a Russian emigre who landed in New York in August 1996. His personal drama is compounded by the fact that his ex-wife, Sophia, from whom he is not fo…