I don’t much care for Napoleon, but I’ve always had a sneaking sympathy for Napoleon III. His boundless ambition combined with an ultimate lack of ruthlessness, his self-importance and vanity combined with flashes of insight into his own personal insignificance, make him a far nicer man than his odious uncle. I mean no self-praise when I say that men who are failures are in general much more attractive than men who are resounding successes.
It was my sympathy for the Emperor of the French that impelled me to pick up a little volume entitled Napoleon III (My Recollections) by Sir William Fraser, Bart. Sir William was elected MP for Barnstaple in 1852, but was unseated because he was deemed to have won by bribery. A social climber on a positively mountaineering scale, he seems to have bumped into royalty all over the place.
He also seems to have been something of a foot fetishist. He says of Napoleon the Little: ‘His feet were not badly shaped, but un-meaning.’ I confess that here I looked down at my feet and wondered what, apart from their evident function in locomotion and in preserving me upright, they meant.
Sir William later dilates on his opinion, without necessarily clarifying it: ‘I have always considered that the foot and the boot together strongly mark the characteristics of human beings. Napoleon III had little to admire in this respect: beyond his feet being of moderate size in proportion to his height. There was none of that muscular and nervous individuality about his feet which adds dignity to a human being. They were what I should describe as “saw-dust feet”.’
I am not sure that I agree that the feet are the mirror of the soul, but there is definitely something about footwear that is worthy of notice. We doctors were taught long ago in medical school that diagnosis begins as the patient walks through the door, and not once he has undressed and lies on the couch. Among the things we notice — or should notice — is his footwear.
Anyone who doubts this ought to attend court, and cast his eyes not upwards towards the faces, but downwards towards the feet. If he does so, he will have no difficulty in distinguishing, by their footwear alone, between the accused and their relatives, the plain-clothes policemen, the solicitors and the barristers who wait outside court. By their shoes shall ye know them.
Barristers are among the only people left in this country who feel it necessary to polish their shoes (or to have their shoes polished for them); while the footwear of the accused is designed specifically to facilitate that urban lope of boundless self-esteem that is the true terror of our society.
Of course, there is a dialectical, or reciprocal, or dependent, relationship between the conservative footwear of the barristers (polished, black, conservative) and that of the accused (designer-labelled, multicoloured, ever-changing in small detail): both types of footwear are expensive, but they are equally the proceeds, or fruit, of crime.
There is another reason doctors are interested in different kinds of shoes: some are more conducive to the generation of bad smells than others. As our national poet would have put it:
Take but the trainers away, untie that lace,
And hark! what odours follow.
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