href="@public@vhost@g@gutenberg@html@files@17579@[email protected]#Footnote_5_5" class="fnanchor pginternal" tag="{http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml}a">[5] Here he spent nearly two years, devoted to his studies. That he laboured hard, both at Brienne and at Paris, we may judge; for his after-life left scanty room for book-work, and of the vast quantity of information which his strong memory ever placed at his disposal, the far greater proportion must have been accumulated now. He made himself a first-rate mathematician; he devoured history—his chosen authors being Plutarch and Tacitus; the former the most simple painter that antiquity has left us of heroic characters—the latter the profoundest master of political wisdom. The poems of Ossian were then new to Europe, and generally received as authentic remains of another age and style of heroism. The dark and lofty genius which they display, their indistinct but solemn pictures of heroic passions, love, battle, victory, and death, were appropriate food for Napoleon's young imagination; and, his taste being little scrupulous as to minor particulars, Ossian continued to be through life his favourite poet. While at Paris, he attracted much notice among those who had access to compare him with his fellows; his acquirements, among other advantages, introduced him to the familiar society of the celebrated Abbé Raynal. Napoleon, shortly after entering the school at Paris, drew up a memorial, which he in person presented to the superintendents of the establishment. He complained that the mode of life was too expensive and delicate for "poor gentlemen," and could not prepare them either for returning to their "modest homes," or for the hardships of the camp. He proposed that, instead of a regular dinner of two courses daily, the students should have ammunition bread, and soldiers' rations, and that they should be compelled to mend and clean their own stockings and shoes. This memorial is said to have done him no service at the military school.

He had just completed his sixteenth year when (in August, 1785,) after being examined by the great Laplace, he obtained his first commission as second lieutenant in the artillery regiment La Fere. His corps was at Valance when he joined it; and he mingled, more largely than might have been expected from his previous habits, in the cultivated society of the place. His personal advantages were considerable; the outline of the countenance classically beautiful; the eye deep-set and dazzlingly brilliant; the figure short, but slim, active, and perfectly knit. Courtly grace and refinement of manners he never attained, nor perhaps coveted; but he early learned the art, not difficult probably to any person possessed of such genius and such accomplishments, of rendering himself eminently agreeable wherever it suited his purpose or inclination to be so.

On the 27th February in this year his father died of a cancer in the stomach, aged forty-five; the same disease which was destined, at a somewhat later period of life, to prove fatal to himself.

While at Valance Buonaparte competed anonymously for a prize offered by the Academy of Lyons for the best answer to Raynal's Question: "What are the principles and institutions by the application of which mankind can be raised to the highest happiness?" He gained the prize: what were the contents of his Essay we know not. Talleyrand, long afterwards, obtained the manuscript, and, thinking to please his sovereign, brought it to him. He threw his eye over two or three pages, and tossed it into the fire. The treatise of the Lieutenant probably abounded in opinions which the Emperor had found it convenient to forget.

Even at Brienne his political feelings had been determined. At Valance he found the officers of his regiment divided, as all the world then was, into two parties; the lovers of the French Monarchy, and those who desired its overthrow. He sided openly with the latter. "Had I been a general," said Napoleon in the evening of his life, "I might have adhered to the king: being a subaltern, I joined the patriots."

In the beginning of 1792 he became captain of artillery (unattached;) and, happening to be in Paris, witnessed the lamentable scenes of the 20th of June, when the revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries, and the king and his family, after undergoing innumerable insults and degradations, with the utmost difficulty preserved their lives. He followed the crowd into the garden before the palace; and when Louis XVI. appeared on a balcony with the red cap on his head, could no longer suppress his contempt and indignation. "Poor driveller!" said Napoleon, loud enough to be heard by those near him, "how could he suffer this rabble to enter? If he had swept away five or six hundred with his cannon, the rest would be running yet." He was also a witness of the still more terrible 10th of August, when, the palace being once more invested, the National Guard assigned for its defence took part with the assailants; the royal family were obliged to take refuge in the National Assembly, and the brave Swiss Guards were massacred almost to a man in the courts of the Tuileries. Buonaparte was a firm friend to the Assembly, to the charge of a party of which, at least, these excesses must be laid; but the spectacle disgusted him. The yells, screams, and pikes with bloody heads upon them, formed a scene which he afterwards described as "hideous and revolting." At this time Napoleon was without employment and very poor; and De Bourienne describes him as wandering idly about Paris, living, chiefly at his (M. de B.'s) expense, at restaurateurs' shops, and, among other wild-enough schemes, proposing that he and his schoolfellow should take some houses on lease, and endeavour to get a little money by subletting them in apartments. Such were the views and occupations of Buonaparte—at the moment when the national tragedy was darkening to its catastrophe. As yet he had been but a spectator of the Revolution, destined to pave his own path to sovereign power; it was not long before circumstances called on him to play a part.

General Paoli, who had lived in England ever since the termination of that civil war in which Charles Buonaparte served under his banner, was cheered, when the great French Revolution first broke out, with the hope that liberty was about to be restored to Corsica. He came to Paris, was received with applause as a tried friend of freedom, and appointed governor of his native island, which for some time he ruled wisely and happily. But as the revolution advanced, Paoli, like most other wise men, became satisfied that license was more likely to be established by its leaders, than law and rational liberty; and avowing his aversion to the growing principles of Jacobinism, and the scenes of tumult and bloodshed to which they gave rise, he was denounced in the National Assembly as the enemy of France. An expedition was sent to deprive him of his government, under the command of La Combe, Michel, and Salicetti, one of the Corsican deputies to the Convention; and Paoli called on his countrymen to take arms in his and their own defence.

Buonaparte happened at that time (1793) to have leave of absence from his regiment, and to be in Corsica on a visit to his mother. He had fitted up a little reading-room at the top of the house as the quietest part of it, and was spending his mornings in study, and his evenings among his family and old acquaintance, when the arrival of the expedition threw the island into convulsion. Paoli, who knew him well, did all he could to enlist him in his cause; he used, among other flatteries, to clap him on the back, and tell him he was "one of Plutarch's men." But Napoleon had satisfied himself that Corsica was too small a country to maintain independence,—that she must fall under the rule either of France or England; and that her interests would be best