Letizia

"I owe my happiness and all the good I have ever done to my mother," Napoleon once wrote, even though it was she who made this simple Corsican woman the mother of an emperor, three kings, a queen and two reigning princesses. And it was not only filial gratitude and princely courtesy that made her say this... Historians themselves pay tribute to the figure of Letizia Buonaparte. Stendhal directly writes about her: "This unparalleled woman, we can safely say, is a unique character in France... The beautiful wife of the little Corsican lawyer, whose entire youth was spent struggling with serious financial problems, was left a widow at the age of 35 with eight children, but she did not collapse..."