1. He was rather unpopular as a child.
"His clear intellectual superiority is unlikely to have helped his popularity with his classmates, who nicknamed him La Paille-au-Nez ('straw up the nose'), which rhymed with 'Napoleone' in Corsican. He was teased for not speaking refined French, for having a father who had had to certify to his nobility, for coming from a conquered nation, for having a relatively large head on a thin frame and for being poorer than most of his school contemporaries."
2. He was a mathematical genius.
"Napoleon excelled at mathematics, later stating: 'To be a good general you must know mathematics; it serves to direct your thinking in a thousand circumstances.' It helped that, as he later put it: 'A singular thing about me is my memory. As a boy I knew the logarithms of thirty or forty numbers.'"
3. He dabbled in romance novels.
"The Topographical Department's curious office hours allowed Napoleon plenty of time to write a romantic novella, entitled Clisson et Eugénie, a swansong for his unrequited love affair with Désirée. Employing short, terse sentences of the heroic tradition, it was consciously or unconsciously based on Goethe's 1774 novella The Sorrows of Young Werther, which Napoleon read no fewer than six times during the Egyptian campaign, but probably first when he was eighteen."
4. He was a patron of the arts...
"His favourite entertainments were intellectual rather than social; he went to public lectures and visited the observatory, the theatre, and the opera. 'Tragedy excites the soul,' he later told one of his secretaries, 'lifts the heart, can and ought to create heroes.'"
5. ...Though publishers did not go unscathed.
"Prussians were outraged at the trial of publisher-bookseller Johann Palm, who sold nationalist German and anti-Napoleonic publications and who was living in neutral Nuremberg when he was arrested. Palm refused to divulge the name of the author of one of his pamphlets, so he was shot in Braunau the next day. 'It's no ordinary crime to spread libels in places occupied by the French armies in order to excite the inhabitants against them,' Napoleon told [his Chief of Staff], but Palm quickly attained the status of martyr."
6. He never tried to escape from exile, though he did unsuccessfully joke about it.
"He did feign an escape early on, for a joke, suddenly riding up a precipice and away from his orderly officer, Captain Thomas Poppleton of the 53rd Regiment, but [Admiral] Cockburn failed to become alarmed and told Poppleton that he would probably find him back at Longwood [Napoleon's residence while in exile], which indeed he did."
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