Napoleon Bonaparte's humiliation

I recall reading somewhere,

possibly a satirical publication,

not a historical document

but an exposé I think, maybe an exaggeration, I don’t know,

that Napoleon was saddled with a humiliatingly skinny penis—

that it was, for whatever reason, snipped

sometime after the postmortem on Saint Helena

and summarily pickled— that it was placed in storage

inside a jar of ethyl alcohol,— that it disappeared

for a long time, often changing hands (by jar) before it was found

hidden, unceremoniously under someone’s bed for chrissake

and that it was blackened and shriveled like a neglected basque pepper.

(the motivation to write this bizarre exposé

began while listening to Beethoven’s “Eroica,”

largely because the 3rd is the only number in his

symphonic literature that made sense for me

to consider penning an exposé on Napoleon's

humiliatingly small penis which to this day

remains tucked between fact and fiction,

save, of course, for those of us who write things down.)