One of my on-and-off obsessions of long standing has revived, thanks to my having stumbled across a spirited little article on the Internet by one Pascal Cazottes, a member of the International Napoleonic Society (and a gentleman of pleasant enough appearance with, perhaps, a touch of the zealot's gleam in the eye) whose learned thesis, translated here into a ludicrous kind of Clouseauesque English (the original is far more palatable, if you can read French), is that the great Marshal Ney, Napoleon's "bravest of the brave," wasn't executed in Paris by a Bourbon militia after the defeat at Waterloo in 1815, as long supposed, but in fact escaped, following a faked execution arranged by fellow soldier and brother Mason the Duke of Wellington. After  a tearful leavetaking of his family, and many wanderings, the old soldier settled in Cleveland County, North Carolina, where he lived out his days, under constant fear of discovery, as Peter Stuart Ney, teacher of French, German, mathematics, swordsmanship (ah, those were the days), and military history. Odd coincidences abound, quite enough to fire up a regiment or two of conspiracy theorists, and enough to make this writer yearn for the time and the patience to confect a novel out of it all: The drunken outbursts down at the local saloon, when Schoolmaster Ney bullied the local boozers with fine points of battles that only the Marshal could have known; the uncanny similarity between his wounds, as documented by a local doctor, and those of the Marshal, known to history; his dying words: "I cannot die with a lie upon my lips; I am Michel Ney, Marshal of France..." God, it's great stuff. Good movie material, too. I'm casting Liam Neeson as Ney. (The tombstone, with its defiant claim, is shown above.)