`Has he luck?" the Emperor Napoleon would ask when an individual was recommended to him for some particularly tricky task.
Fortune, it must be said, smiled frequently on the Emperor himself at various stages of his long career, but at two crucial points he was singularly unlucky with the weather. The first was in 1812. Napoleon arrived at the gates of Moscow in September to find the city deserted and in flames. He lingered for a fateful month, which then resulted in his retreating troops experiencing the most severe winter ever known in eastern Europe.
The swollen rivers of Russia, running north-south across the westward path of the fugitives, contained large blocks of swiftly moving ice, and continuous heavy snow impeded progress in between.
By December the Grande Armee was in disarray; of the 400,000 men who had marched proudly into Russia some months previously, only a fraction lived through the icy cold to tell the tale.
Napoleon himself, as we know, survived the retreat from Moscow, but it was, as Talleyrand remarked, "le commencement de la fin", the beginning of the end. The Emperor himself described it more succinctly: "De sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas", "There is only one step from the sublime to the ridiculous". A little more than a year later, on June 18th, 1814, the weather helped to defeat Napoleon for a second time near the Belgian village of Waterloo.
The Emperor's legendary success as a general rested largely on his quick, intuitive reactions to the ebb and flow of fortune at different places on a battlefield. For these tactics, dry ground and a firm footing are essential.
However, heavy rain on June 17th persisted overnight until 8 a.m. on the morning of the battle, and turned the fields of Belgium into quagmire.
Napoleon, confronted by a sea of mud, saw that the French artillery and cavalry would be unable to advance across the fields in any sort of order, and so he postponed attack in the hope that the sun might appear and dry the soil - but it did not.
It was almost noon before the Emperor accepted the inevitable and ordered the attack, but the delay had allowed time for Prussian reinforcements to arrive in support of the Duke of Wellington, and that was that. The Battle of Waterloo ended in defeat for Emperor Napoleon, and he abdicated a few days later, spending the remaining seven years of his life in exile on lonely St Helena in the south Atlantic. He died there, 180 years ago today, on May 5th, 1821.