On July 7, 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte signed the first of the Treaties of Tilsit.  This was with Emperor Alexander I of Russia, which established an alliance between the French Empire and Imperial Russia that would endure forever, or for the next five years, whichever came first.  The second Treaty of Tilsit was signed on July 9 on behalf of the King of Prussia.  Prussia had already signed an armistice with France a couple weeks earlier, but the purpose of this treaty was to demand territory from Prussia.  From this territory, Napoleon set up the puppet states of the Kingdom of Westphalia, the Free City of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland), and the Duchy of Warsaw.  Prussia was stripped of about half of its territory, and was forced to reduce its army significantly.  Russia entered into war with Great Britain and Sweden when it aligned itself with France, which was great news for France.  France was shaping up like a military juggernaut in Europe; no continental power seemed strong enough to

Sideburns are nothing new.  They go in and out of fashion, and have for centuries.  In recent years, they seem to be enjoying an upswing in popularity, but we have records of them dating back at least to the fourth century BCE, in a mosaic that shows Alexander the Great sporting them.  Depictions of Alexander usually show him clean-shaven, since the Greek military of the time famously forbade facial hair.   (This was mostly aimed at beards, which men might grow very long, giving the enemy something on your face to pull in the heat of battle, potentially putting you at a disadvantage.) Is Alexander greater with sideburns? or without? The ancient Greeks might have had a word for sideburns, or at least a way to describe them.  In America they were known as side-whiskers until the 1860s.   Beards were getting to be more fashionable than they had been in the early part of the century, and some men saw an opportunity to use facial hair for an expression of style. One such m