Pope

"Since the campaign had begun a year earlier, Napoleon had crossed the Apennines and the Alps, defeated a Sardinian army and no fewer than six Austrian armies, and killed, wounded or captured 120,000 Austrian soldiers. All this he had done before his twenty-eighth birthday. Eighteen months earlier he had been an unknown, moody soldier writing essays on suicide; now he was famous across Europe, having defeated mighty Austria, wrung peace treaties from the Pope and the kings of Piedmont and Naples, abolished the medieval dukedom of Modena, and defeated in every conceivable set of military circumstances most of Austria’s most celebrated generals – Beaulieu, Wurmser, Provera, Quasdanovich, Alvinczi, Davidovich – and outwitted the Archduke Charles."

"For global expansion, he needed an advertising medium that was known worldwide. In a meeting with the employees, he went through the names of worldwide celebrities, and Wild jokingly said that the Pope would be his first choice, but unfortunately he would not be considered. The same would probably apply to heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali. "But the same moment I spoke in our meeting of the sheer impossibility of winning this world-famous athlete for us, the idea of hiring 'the greatest champion of all time' became fixed in my head.""