Page 124 - Improve_Your_Written_English [Marion_Field]

110 / P ART TW O: E NGLIS H IN ACT ION

rules you have learnt in Part 1 of this book. Study the
following example:

Passage to be summarised

Napoleon and Josephine were married at a civil
ceremony on 9 March 1796 after the bridegroom had
kept his bride waiting for two hours. Josephine, who was
thirty-two, was older than Napoleon and as her birth
certificate was in Martinique, she conveniently took
four years off her age. The bridegroom gallantly added
a year to his so on the marriage certificate they both
appeared as twenty-eight. No relations on either side
were present and the Bonapartes, bitterly opposed to
the marriage, pursued a vendetta against Josephine that
lasted almost to the end of her life.
Napoleon soon found that he could not dominate his
new wife as he could his soldiers. On their wedding
night, she refused to let him remove her little dog,
Fortune, from her bed where he always slept. Later her
husband ruefully wrote, ‘I was told that I had the choice
of sleeping in another bed or sharing that one with
Fortune.’ The dog made his mark in history by biting
the General in the leg!
The honeymoon was brief as two days after the
wedding Napoleon left his new wife in Paris while he
took up his post as Commander-in-Chief of the Army of
Italy. From there he sent passionate love letters to her
and she wrote back to him though not as frequently.
(Approximately 200 words)