*“Bonaparte's victory bulletin was typical in every respect of the many hundreds that were to follow in the course of the next thirteen years—the eagerly awaited bulletins, from Germany, from Austria, from Poland, from Russia, from Spain; the bulletins that set the imagination of young boys on fire and whose memory made the postwar years seem so drab and dull to them; the bulletins that old couples and young wives and mistresses and sisters would pore over, wondering whether the digits and the ciphers representing the crippled and the dead, the brave who were immortalized in an anonymous glory, included those they loved; the bulletins to which there seemed to be no end, as if henceforth the purpose of men's lives would be forever the gain of honor at the price of death; the bulletins that spoke, in lapidary yet incandescent prose, of the beauty of battlefields, the splendor of cities aflame; the glorious, hateful bulletins, with their exhilarating statistics of captured flags and guns, of enemies killed and wounded, of individual acts of bravery, that form the stanzas of the epic of Napoleon.” J. C. Herold, The Age of Napoleon (American Heritage, 1963); “To lie like a bulletin” was a proverbial expression in Napoleon's army, Ibid., 408. See also Louis-Leopold Boilly's painting of the French family poring over one of these bulletins.