After the Battle of Lodi, General Napoleon is sitting in an inn and eating his dinner when a Lieutenant arrives to tell him that some of his dispatches have been stolen. Napoleon determines that a strange lady also staying in the inn has them in her possession, and thus begins a battle of wits for the papers-and over Napoleon's philosophy.
This brisk, witty one-act comedy pits a young Napoleon's cunning against a mysterious woman's nerve, turning a battle for stolen letters into a delightfully sharp duel of ideas.
The Man of Destiny was written and first performed in 1897, and has been adapted for radio and television. It was first published in the collection Plays Pleasant.
The source for this public-domain ebook is Standard Ebooks (standardebooks.org). Ebooks from other sources often have typos, inconsistent spelling, missing accent marks, and missing punctuation. Ebooks from Standard Ebooks are proofread line by line against a scan of the original printed pages, then proofread again from cover to cover. They are also formatted and typeset following a professional-grade style manual, resulting in new editions supporting state-of-the-art ereader technology: automatic hyphenation, popup footnotes, complete and consistent metadata, high-resolution and scalable vector graphics, and ereader-compatible tables of contents. All of this makes the finished ebooks accurate, functional, and beautiful, a pleasure to read. (Waking Lion Press is not affiliated with or endorsed by Standard Ebooks.)