← Back to the front page

History’s Most Lunatic Events and People

Khalid Elhassan August 21, 2020 34 min

La Belle Alliance - Battle of Waterloo — Blucher, left, meeting Wellington at Waterloo. Wikimedia

35. Lunatic Delusions

What Blucher believed he was about to give birth to. Travel Leisure India

Among Blucher’s more lunatic delusions, which came and went over the years, was his belief that a Frenchman had impregnated him. As a result, for some time, Blucher went about convinced that he was about to give birth to a baby elephant at any moment.

Another lunatic conviction was Blucher’s paranoia that his servants, bribed by France, had heated the floor of his room to lava levels, in order to scorch his feet. So when seated in a chair, Blucher would keep his feet raised from the floor. If he had to get up, he would skip around swiftly, hopping gingerly on tiptoe.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.