[Taltarzac725]

The History of Napoleon Bonaparte, by John Gibson Lockhart.

There is a 1829 book on Napoleon viewable from the Internet. This is the book listed above in the link by John Gibson Lockhart. It probably covers the man's brawn, his use of the musket, his inland attack into Egypt, as well as various other ventures he had including those in which had joint control with Empress Josephine.

Lockhart writes about Napoleon's getting the news of the defeat at Trafalgar:

Buonaparte, when he heard of this mighty discomfiture, which for ever put an end to all his visions of invading England, is said to have lost that possession of himself, which he certainly maintained when the catastrophe of Aboukir was announced to him at Cairo. Yet arrogance mingled strangely in his expressions of sorrow.—"I cannot be everywhere," said he to the messenger of the evil tidings—as if Napoleon could have had any more chance of producing victory by his presence at Trafalgar, than Nelson would have dreamed of having by appearing on[Pg 220] horseback at Marengo. In his newspapers, and even in his formal messages to the senate at Paris, Buonaparte always persisted in denying that there had been a great defeat at Trafalgar, or even a great battle. But how well he appreciated the facts of the case was well known to the unfortunate Admiral Villeneuve. That brave officer, after spending a short time in England, was permitted to return to France on his parole. He died almost immediately afterwards at Rennes: whether by his own hand, in the agony of despair, as the French Gazette asserted, or assassinated, as was commonly believed at the time, by some of the blood-hardened minions of Fouché's police, is a mystery not yet cleared up; and, perhaps, never destined to be so until the day comes in which nothing shall be hid.