Question: Why did Napoleon always keep his hand tucked in his vest?
Answer: Whenever you think of Napoleon, you think: short man; kept hand in vest; came up short (hah!) during invasion of Russia; suffered from "Napoleonic complex;" Battle of Waterloo "was his Waterloo."
We can tell you why he kept the hand in the vest: When posing, one always struggles to figure out what to do with one's hands. Ain't it the truth!
Napoleon was a chronic poser. He was always sitting for portraits or riding into battle with everyone watching him or standing by some throne, and in these situations it is normal to be very self-conscious about the hands, what the heck to do with the hands.
So why didn't he put his hands in his pants pockets like a regular Joe? Because he wore the kind of dorky pants that came only to the knees and had no pockets. They didn't invent pocketed pants until later in the 1800s. Apparently people didn't have wallets or car keys at that point.
The fact is, Napoleon probably didn't walk around with his hand in his vest. We think of that pose because it is the one in the famous painting, "Napoleon in His Study," by Jacques Louis "Give Me a Last Name" David, now hanging at The National Gallery in Washington.
Florence Coman, the National Gallery's assistant curator of French painting, offers another possible reason the Napoleonic hand was inserted into the Napoleonic vest: The painter may have had trouble painting hands.
"Some artists can't do that with any great facility, and somehow do whatever they can to mask their deficiency," she said.
For example, Henri Rousseau, the post-impressionist painter, had trouble with both hands and feet. "He always, when he was painting feet, would show them masked by a lot of grass spears sticking up in front of them," she says.
Hands and feet don't look good in paintings or illustrations - there are too many things happening there, a tangle of veins and bones and knuckled digits, distracting from the simple curvilinear elegance of other body parts. The David portrait of Napoleon may be nothing more than an upscale version of the Mickey Mouse syndrome: Mickey's only got four fingers per hand, because the illustrators couldn't make five look right.
So Napoleon's lucky. Two centuries down the road, people may think he had a fetish about scratching his tummy, but at least they don't go around asking, "Why did Napoleon only have four fingers on each hand?"
The Mailbag:
Celia A. of Miami writes, "Why don't we fall out of bed more often?"
Dear Celia: A corollary to your question is, why do kids fall out of bed but not adults?
We spoke to Mary Carskadon, editor of the "Encyclopedia of Sleep and Dreaming," and she said that you don't fall out of bed because you aren't totally asleep when you toss and turn.
"When we do roll over, we are somewhat aroused," she says. "Our brain, in order to initiate that movement, has come closer to an awake state, where there is some sensory processing."
So the brain processes the edge of the bed. When you wake up later, and find yourself in some strange position, you'll have no memory of how you got there, because brain has the strange habit of purging your memory of the moments right before you fall asleep (or fall back asleep).
Kids do often fall out of bed, probably because they are much deeper sleepers. You may have noticed that sleeping infants can be lugged around like a sack of potatoes, dragged across broken glass, exposed to fire and still won't wake up. They also sleepwalk more than adults.
"Sleep is so intense in young children that it almost defies our normal description of what sleep is, which is a quickly reversible behavioral disengagement from the environment," Carskadon says.
We can think of one other reason adults don't fall out of bed: The forces affecting two people in the sack are often centripetal, not centrifugal.
- That recent column about monkeys randomly pounding on typewriters and coming up with "Hamlet" didn't convince everyone. Gertrude D. of Orting, Wash., says "Reason tells us that the monkey could not even write the alphabet; nor could a person do so haphazardly. . . . Order cannot develop mindlessly out of chaos or accidentally."
She continues: "Thus a chance combination of lifeless elements could not have produced a live bacteria which is said to be the origin of the billions of living species which inhabit the earth. Neither could a `Big Bang' result in the order that is evident throughout the universe."
Dear Gertrude: But what does "reason" tell you is a more likely explanation for these things? We'd guess that most theologians would say that the belief in a divine Creator is a matter of faith, not a matter of reason or logic or hard-headed common sense. Your minister doesn't conclude a reading of scripture by saying, "Well, doesn't that sound logical?"
- Daniel M. of Boynton Beach, Fla. writes, "Are fat people really jolly? And why is it that it's fat people who are always geniuses or criminologists?"
Dear Daniel: Santa Claus is jolly. Orson Welles pretended to be jolly. Bill Clinton seemed jollier before he got on the intense jogging program. But despite this massive onslaught of hard evidence, we have to report that morphology and personality have no scientifically verified connection. Not since the 1940s has any reputable scientist tried to connect the twain. One problem is that, although you can precisely measure someone's weight and body dimensions, you can't really measure whether he or she is "jolly."
On TV, we might note, the occupation of genius or criminologist is perfect for a heavyset actor or actress (William Conrad, Raymond Burr, Angela Lansbury) who is not ideally suited to play the typical romantic lead.
- And finally, Norman T. of Columbus, Ga., says that after reading our monkey column, "I suggest that whoever paid for your education and training as a writer ask for their money back."
Dear Norm: Mostly we used federal grants and guaranteed student loans, so you paid for it, pal.