Napoleon's hat is an obvious choice I guess to list as a famous 
hat, but that's not the hat I have in mind. That was his hat for 
show. I am thinking of his private bathing cap, which in all hon-
esty wasn't much different than the one any jerk might buy at a 
corner drugstore now, except for two minor eccentricities. The 
first one isn't even funny: Simply it was a white rubber bathing 
cap, but too small. Napoleon led such a hectic life ever since his 
childhood, even farther back than that, that he never had a 
chance to buy a new bathing cap and still as a grown-up—well, 
he didn't really grow that much, but his head did: He was a pin-
head at birth, and he used, until his death really, the same little 
tiny bathing cap that he was born in, and this meant that later it 
was very painful to him and gave him many headaches, as if he 
needed more. So, he had to vaseline his skull like crazy to even 
get the thing on. The second eccentricity was that it was a tricorn 
bathing cap. Scholars like to make a lot out of this, and it would 
be easy to do. My theory is simple-minded to be sure: that be-
neath his public head there was another head and it was a pyra-
mid or something.