Napoleon's Little Red Man

Despite his reputation as a powerful military genius, Napoleon Bonaparte was famous for interpreting his dreams, telling ghost stories and a belief in several-hundred-year-old prophecies that predicted his rise and fall as emperor of France. He also firmly believed that he had encountered an entity that he referred to as the ‘Little Red Man of Destiny’. This crimson dwarf became well-known as a harbinger of tragedy and disaster across France, appearing to some of the nation’s most notable personalities over a period of more than 260 years. It seemed to primarily manifest around the Louvre and Tuileries Palace (a royal palace that was on the right bank of the River Seine until 1817) in Paris.

## A Long History of Hauntings

Catherine de Medici was the first person to confront the scarlet spectre, when she came face-to-face with the creature during the construction of the Tuileries in 1564. She described it as a gnome-like creature dressed entirely in red. She decided that this uninvited guest was not a man of flesh and blood, and that it was an omen of bad luck. Blood red was an appropriate colour for the entity to wear, because Catherine had already begun to stir tension between the Roman Catholics and Protestants in France, and it was she who would later go on to induce the king to order the horrific St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots. Henry IV of France would be the next person to see the Red Man, right before he was assassinated by an insane schoolteacher in 1610. Startled chambermaids witnessed the gnome in the bed of Louis XVI in 1792 – while the monarch was making a futile attempt to escape the French revolutionaries that would soon literally have his head. Marie Antoinette saw the being in the corridor of the Tuileries Palace on August 9th of 1792, just one day before a mob stormed the palace and ended the monarchy. Only a few months later, the guards claimed to have seen the scarlet sprite in the prison where Louis and Marie Antoinette awaited their execution in 1793.

Napoleon first bore witness to the Red Man in 1798 during his Egyptian campaign. The entity is said to have appeared before Napoleon and to have made a bargain with the officer. According to the terms of the contract (has no-one learnt not to make deals with demons?), Napoleon would be allowed to enjoy victory and triumph across the battlefields of Europe for a decade. The vermillion visitor said that he had advised leaders of France before, and declared that he had now come to counsel Napoleon. The officer’s phantasmal adviser told him that he had been at his side since he was a child and taunted him by saying ‘I know you better than you know yourself’.

The dahlia dwarf told Napoleon that the French fleet had not obeyed his orders. Despite the triumphant note on which the Egyptian campaign had begun after the Battle of the Pyramids, the phantom told the officer that the operation would fail and that he would return to France to find her closed in by England, Russia, Turkey and other European allies. Of course, the Red Man’s predictions came true. After the Battle of Wagram in 1809, Napoleon was in his headquarters in Schobrunn, when the Red Man materialised at midnight. At this point, the conqueror had already conducted his promised ten years of successful military operations, and so he asked for a five-year extension of his contract. The fuchsia phantom agreed, with the condition that Napoleon would never launch a campaign in Russia. Being Napoleon, he ignored this and was met with a disaster in Russia – hat would prove far more significant than the physical defeat that came at Waterloo. The Little Red Man seemed to follow Napoleon through all of his ambition campaigns, and the people at Tuileries were familiar with stories of the Red Man appearing to Napoleon during his stays at the palace.

On the morning of January 1st, 1814 – shortly before the Emperor would be forced to abdicate – the Red Man made his final appearance. The carmine critter first appeared to the Counsellor of State Mole and demanded to be allowed to see the Emperor on matters of urgent importance. The Counsellor had been given strict orders that Napoleon did not want to be disturbed, but when he delivered the message of the Little Red Man’s presence, the fiery phantom was granted immediate access. It is said that Napoleon begged the Red Man for time to complete certain proposals, but the puce prophet gave him only three more months to achieve a general peace or else he would face the consequences. Napoleon desperately tried to launch a new eastern campaign in an attempt to gain more time, but France fell into the hands of the European allies due to this ill-advised move. On April 1st, three months after the Red Man’s final visit to Napoleon, Talleyrand and the Senate called for the ex-Emperor’s abdication. He spend his final days in exile on the island of Saint Helena, and he died on the 5th of May 1821.

## Analysis

The Little Red Man bears an uncanny resemblance to the prophetic, red-wearing dwarf mentioned in the folklore of Detroit, known as the Nain Rouge, which was said to have been seen by the founder of the city after a fortune teller told him to beware of offending it. As these stories go, he did just this and the creature has since become known in the region as an omen of disaster and bad luck. An article on the Nain Rouge phenomenon will be forthcoming in the near future.

## Source

This source is where I actually got the information from, but it later redirected me to a virus website, and so I would use somewhere else to fact-check my story if I were you… http://theunexplainedmysteries.com/The-Little-Red-Man.html