Napoleon Bonaparte

Choreographer, stage producer and author Stephen Papich, 80, died Dec. 16 of cancer at his home in Los Angeles, said his friend Robert Wood. Through the 1950s, Papich was a staff choreographer at 20th Century Fox studios, where he worked on a number of films, including "Demetrius and the Gladiators" with Victor Mature, "Desiree," starring Marlon Brando as Napoleon Bonaparte, and "South Pacific" with Mitzi Gaynor.

Los Angeles Times travel editor Jerry Hulse received the Insignia of the Chevalier de la Legion d'Honneur, the highest award the French government bestows, at ceremonies on Monday evening at the French Consulate in Beverly Hills. The Legion of Honor, awarded by President Francois Mitterrand and presented to Hulse by French Minister of Tourism Jean-Jacques Descamps, was established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802 and recognizes individuals who contribute to France's renown.

Leonardo da Vinci took them, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, Johannes Brahms and Winston Churchill. You could probably use one right now. Midday naps have long been touted as a good thing, lowering blood pressure and driving down the risk of heart attack. And if you snooze long enough, researchers have now found, they also permit your memory banks to do their filing, leaving your brain cleared and ready to learn in the latter half of the day. UC Berkeley psychology professor Matthew Walker and colleagues put 39 young adults through a demanding learning task and tested on it at noon.

No trip to your local Zales or Kay Jewelers will cost as much as what someone paid over the weekend for a diamond and sapphire engagement ring that Napoleon gave to his beloved Josephine. The ring reportedly sold for 730,000 euros ($948,000) at an auction in France on Sunday. The Osenat auction house in the town of Fontainebleau had expected the ring to fetch between 10,000 euros and 15,000 euros. The ring was part of a larger auction of items from the collection of Victor Napoleon and his wife, the Princess Clementine of Belgium.  The catalogue states that the engagement ring once belonged in the collection of Napoleon III, who was a nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, and his wife, Eugenie, and then to their descendants.

Paul Corcellet, gourmet grocer and chef who dealt in elephant trunks, hippopotamus, lion and python, has died. He was 83. His family, whose ancestors got into the gourmet food business as coffee merchants to King Louis XVI in 1760, said Corcellet died Friday. Corcellet's shop on the Rue des Petits Champs, between the Palais Royal and the Opera, was a veritable Ali Baba's den of taste treats.

At one time, SONOR, UC San Diego's contemporary music ensemble, performed nothing but new music: just-completed pieces whose parts had been hastily copied out the day of the performance or tapes whose beeps and crackles had been synthesized only the night before. Compared to this standard, Saturday evening's SONOR concert at Mandeville Auditorium dipped back into the cobwebbed vaults of early music.

SERIES So You Think You Can Dance: The top 10 dancers strut their stuff for the judges, including guest judge Neil Patrick Harris, on a new episode of the talent search (8 p.m. Fox). Modern Family: Matt Dillon and "Cheers'" Shelley Long guest star in this repeat (9 p.m. ABC). Primetime Nightline: Beyond Belief: Accounts of demonic possession are examined (10 p.m. ABC). Storage Wars: The reality series returns for another season (10 and 10:30 p.m. A&E). The World According to Paris: The latest reality series starring socialite Paris Hilton ends its first season (10 p.m. Oxygen)

Thieves stole a truck loaded with nearly $1 million in jewelry, furs, historic documents and other high-priced merchandise from an Irvine hotel parking lot just hours before they were to have been sold at auction, police said Saturday. It was the second robbery within a week for the victim, Alexander Mahban. On Monday, he lost $5 million in jewelry to thieves in San Diego. "I wish they'd just put a bullet in my head.

Maybe there is such a thing as glutting the concert market, after all. Either that, or some other factor has to explain what went so wrong Saturday for Speculum Musicae that only 50 people showed up at the Japan America Theatre. Certainly the high reputation of this superb New York-based group should, by any measure, have attracted a sizable crowd. But as New Music Los Angeles 1987 Festival wound down, this event might just have represented one too many.

An Orange County company is helping Russia set up a system so esoteric that few outside the fields of land planning and property taxation have ever heard of it: a land cadastre. The "land" part is self-evident; it's "cadastre" that throws people. The word was coined by Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s to describe a systematic classification and valuation of all French lands under control of the government. The word comes from the Greek term katastichon, meaning "line by line."