Napoleon has been quoted as saying, "I may lose a battle, but I shall never lose a minute." This story, from The Oldest Profession: A History of Prostitution, by Lujo Basserman, presents a twist on Napoleon's claim:

"The apparent humiliation of Mlle Georges [a famous Parisian actress with whom Napoleon had just ended an affair] was followed by a fiasco in the case of Mme Duchesnois. For after all there were now other claims upon Napoleon's time than those of his actresses. When Mme Duchesnois arrived at the Tuileries the consul sent a message to tell her to wait. After a while she timidly notified him, through a servant, of her continued presence. The order came back that she was to undress. She spent another half-hour, nude and shivering, in an antechamber through which couriers and servants continually passed. Then she heard, with relief, the command: 'She can go to bed now.'

"But there were no more developments that evening. Napoleon worked all through the night. Mme Duchesnois, half-crazy with rage and shame, was obliged to slip into her carefully chosen underwear without achieving her purpose and return home."

Basserman relates a perhaps even more appalling tale:

"Bonaparte did not always decide in favour of his official work. On one occasion he had been greatly struck by the youth and abundant gaiety of another Theatre Francais actress named Bourgoin and sent her an invitation to call on him, though he had been told that she was then the mistress of his Minister of the Interior, the outstanding statesman and chemist Jean Antoine Chaptal, aged forty-eight. The two men happened to be working in the same room when Mlle Bourgoin was waiting for him in his bedroom.

'Tell her to undress. I'll join her in a moment,' the ever busy Head of the State replied. The brutality of this answer was no worse than tactless. But it lost him a colleague who had carried through a vast modernization of the French economic and traffic systems in four years."