Salad Days (Rebroadcast) - 3 October 2022
A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over
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The Empress Josephine, Pausessois, Josephine or Not Tonight Josephine?
The story is that the Empress Josephine was not able to give Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte an heir. The idea was that he couldn't keep up with her in the bedroom and that he would say she would ask for a bedroom encounter. This is completely apocryphal. We don't think he ever said exactly that. There's no record of it because the story doesn't really appear until the early 1900s, more than 100 years later. It was turned into a musical number by Florie Ford in 1915.
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