My Ongoing Napoleonics Project, prologue

Hello,

So the last project I had started working on in November 2017 was Napoleonic French infantry.

I had started on these for the same reason I had started so many others, something in a video game, movie, or television series had gotten my attention, gotten under my skin, so to speak, and set me on a "feeding frenzy" where I would read, read, read all I could find on the internet about an army, a period, and begin painting furiously, like a madwoman.

The series "Rome" and a copy of Livy's "The War With Hannibal", a Crimbo gift my dear mother, since departed, had given me had gotten me interested in raising my Polybian Roman and Later Carthaginian DBA armies.  I do not know how to play DBA, I too do not understand the rules, as they were written, but it does have some wonderful army lists in it though!

Watching the film "Gettysburg" and reading a book on General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson I got from one of my brothers who had been home schooled with a fundamentalist Christian program had set me off on my American Civil War feeding frenzy.

I don't remember what had set me off on my first Napoleonic rush though, but it did result in six battalions of lovely line infantry I have yet to show here.

This time around, it was the video game Hitman: Agent 47, the 2016 release. In it, our protagonist goes to different locales such as Paris, Hokkaido, Marrakesh, Bangkok and Sapienza, a town in Italy, which might be fictional.

In Paris, there is a fashion show at the Palais de Walewska, probably a palace given by Napoleon as a gift to his mistress Maria Walewska, a Polish noblewoman, who herself was married, but who the other nobility had egged on to pursue the affair, or to give in to the Emperor's advances in order to get France's help in reconstituting the Kingdom of Poland.

Anyway, the palace is liberally sprinkled with images of the Emperor, statues of him, artifacts, like documents, clothing, weapons, all of course digital images because this is, after all, a video game... and the centerpiece, a diorama of French artillery in action in a village, and in another room in the palace, another diorama in progress.  There are two versions of the diorama, by the way, a summer scene and a winter scene (shades of the Berezina), just as there are two versions of the Paris scenario, the one originally included, and the Christmas version, where Agent 47's targets are the villains from the film "Home Alone".

So when Agent 47 puts a coin in the slot in the glass case, he is rewarded with the strains of the 1812 Overture, and little animations of the little cannons firing with little French tricolors flying by each artillery piece.

Only the cannons, on closer inspection, are manned by British Highland Infantry!

Anyway, this is what got me started.

So... on to part 2