Chapter II: Brienne. 1779-1785

Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica

by John Kendrick Bangs

As we have seen, the young Corsican was only ten years of age
when, through the influence of Count Marboeuf, an old friend of the
Bonaparte family, he was admitted to the military school at Brienne.
Those who were present at the hour of his departure from home say
that Napoleon would have wept like any other child had he yielded to
the impulses of his heart, and had be not detected a smile of
satisfaction upon the lips of his brother Joseph. It was this smile
that drove all tender emotions from his breast. Taking Joseph to one
side, he requested to know the cause of his mirth.

"I was thinking of something funny," said Joseph, paling
slightly as he observed the stern expression of Napoleon's face.

"Oh, indeed," said Napoleon; "and what was that something? I'd
like to smile myself."

"H'm!--ah--why," faltered Joseph, "it may not strike you as
funny, you know. What is a joke for one man is apt to be a serious
matter for another, particularly when that other is of a taciturn and
irritable disposition."

"Very likely," said Napoleon, dryly; "and sometimes what is a
joke for the man of mirth is likewise in the end a serious matter for
that same humorous person. This may turn out to be the case in the
present emergency. What was the joke? If I do not find it a
humorous joke, I'll give you a parting caress which you won't forget
in a hurry."

"I was only thinking," said Joseph, uneasily, "that it is a very
good thing for that little ferry-boat you are going away on that you
are going on it."

Here Joseph smiled weakly, but Napoleon was grim as ever.

"Well," he said, impatiently, "what of that?"

"Why," returned Joseph, "it seemed to me that such a tireless
little worker as the boat is would find it very restful to take a
Nap."

For an instant Napoleon was silent.

"Joseph," said he, as he gazed solemnly out of the window, "I
thank you from the bottom of my heart for this. I had had regrets at
leaving home. A moment ago I was ready to break down for the sorrow
of parting from my favorite Alp, from my home, from my mother, and my
little brass cannon; but now--now I can go with a heart steeled
against emotion. If you are going in for humor of that kind, I'm
glad I'm going away. Farewell."

With this, picking Joseph up in his arms and concealing him
beneath the sofa cushions, Napoleon imprinted a kiss upon his
mother's cheek, rushed aboard the craft that was to bear him to fame,
and was soon but a memory in the little house at Ajaccio. "Parting
is such sweet sorrow," murmured Joseph, as he watched the little
vessel bounding over the turquoise waters of the imprisoned sea. "I
shall miss him; but there are those who wax fat on grief, and, if I
know myself, I am of that brand."

Arrived at Paris, Napoleon was naturally awe-stricken by the
splendors of that wonderful city.

"I shall never forget the first sight I had of Paris," he said,
years later, when speaking of his boyhood to Madame Junot, with whom
he was enjoying a tete-a-tete in the palace at Versailles. "I
wondered if I hadn't died of sea-sickness on the way over, as I had
several times wished I might, and got to heaven. I didn't know how
like the other place it was at that time, you see. It was like an
enchanted land, a World's Fair forever, and the prices I had to pay
for things quite carried out the World's Fair idea. They were
enormous. Weary with walking, for instance, I hired a fiacre and
drove about the city for an hour, and it cost me fifty francs; but I
fell in with pleasant enough people, one of whom gave me a ten-franc
ticket entitling me to a seat on a park bench--for five francs."

Madame Junot laughed.

"And yet they claim that bunco is a purely American
institution," she said.

"Dame!" cried Napoleon, rising from the throne, and walking
excitedly up and down the palace floor, "I never realized until this
moment that I had been swindled! Bourrienne, send Fouche to me. I
remember the man distinctly, and if he lives he has yet to die."

Calming down, he walked to Madame Junot's side, and, taking her
by the hand, continued:

"And then the theatres! What revelations of delight they were!
I used to go to the Theatre Francais whenever I could sneak away and
had the money to seat me with the gods in the galleries. Bernhardt
was then playing juvenile parts, and Coquelin had not been heard of.
Ah! my dear Madame Junot," he added, giving her ear a delicate pinch,
"those were the days when life seemed worth the living--when one of a
taciturn nature and prone to irritability could find real pleasure in
existence. Oh to be unknown again!"

And then, Madame Junot's husband having entered the room, the
Emperor once more relapsed into a moody silence.

But to return to Brienne. Napoleon soon found that there is a
gulf measurable by no calculable distance between existence as the
dominating force of a family and life as a new boy at a boarding-
school. He found his position reversed, and he began for the first
time in his life to appreciate the virtues of his brother Joseph. He
who had been the victorious general crossing the Alps now found
himself the Alp, with a dozen victorious generals crossing him; he
who had been the gunner was now the target, and his present inability
to express his feelings in language which his tormentors could
understand, for he had not yet mastered the French tongue, kept him
in a state of being which may well be termed volcanic.

"I simply raged within in those days," Napoleon once said to
Las Casas. "I could have swallowed my food raw and it would have
been cooked on its way down, I boiled so. They took me for a
snow-clad Alp, when, as a matter of fact, I was a small Vesuvius,
with a temperature that would have made Tabasco sauce seem like iced
water by contrast."

His treatment at the hands of his fellow-students did much to
increase his irritability, but he kept himself well in hand, biding
the time when he could repay their insults with interest. They
jeered him because he was short--short of stature and short of funds;
they twitted him on being an alien, calling him an Italian, and
asking him why he did not seek out a position in the street-cleaning
bureau instead of endeavoring to associate with gentlemen. To this
the boy made a spirited reply.

"I am fitting myself for that," he said. "I'll sweep your
Parisian streets some day, and some of you particles will go with the
rest of the dust before my broom."

He little guessed how prophetic were these words.

Again, they tormented Napoleon on being the son of a lawyer, and
asked him who his tailor was, and whether or not his garments were
the lost suits of his father's clients, the result of which was that,
though born of an aristocratic family, the boy became a pronounced
Republican, and swore eternal enmity to the high-born. Another
result of this attitude towards him was that he retired from the
companionship of all save his books, and he became intimate with
Homer and Ossian and Plutarch--familiar with the rise and fall of
emperors and empires. Challenged to fight a duel with one of his
classmates for a supposititious insult, he accepted, and, having the
choice in weapons, chose an examination in mathematics, the one first
failing in a demonstration to blow his brains out. "That is the
safer for you," he said to his adversary. "You are sure to lose; but
the after-effects will not be fatal, because you have no brains to
blow out, so you can blow out a candle instead."

Whatever came of the duel we are not informed; but it is to be
presumed that it did not result fatally for young Bonaparte, for he
lived many years after the incident, as most of our readers are
probably aware. Had he not done so, this biography would have had to
stop here, and countless readers of our own day would have been
deprived of much entertaining fiction that is even now being
scattered broadcast over the world with Napoleon as its hero. His
love of books combined with his fondness for military life was never
more beautifully expressed than when he wrote to his mother: "With
my sword at my side and my Homer in my pocket, I hope to carve my way
through the world."

The beauty and simplicity of this statement is not at all
affected by Joseph's flippant suggestion that by this Napoleon
probably meant that he would read his enemies to sleep with his
Homer, and then use his sword to cut their heads off. Joseph, as we
have already seen, had been completely subjugated by his younger
brother, and it is not to be wondered at, perhaps, that, with his
younger brother at a safe distance, he should manifest some jealousy,
and affect to treat his sentiments with an unwarranted levity.

For Napoleon's self-imposed solitude everything at Brienne
arranged itself propitiously. Each of the students was provided with
a small patch of ground which he could do with as he pleased, and
Napoleon's use of his allotted share was characteristic. He
converted it into a fortified garden, surrounded by trees and
palisades.

"Now I can mope in peace," he said--and he did.

It has been supposed by historians that it was here that
Napoleon did all of his thinking, mapping out his future career, and
some of them have told us what he thought. He dreamed of future
glory always, one of them states; but whether upon the authority of a
palisade or a tiger-lily is not mentioned. Others have given us his
soliloquies as he passed to and fro in this little retreat alone, and
heard only by the stars at night; but for ourselves, we must be
accurate, and it is due to the reader at this point that we should
confess--having no stars in our confidence--our entire ignorance as
to what Napoleon Bonaparte said, did, or thought when sitting in
solitude in his fortified bower; though if our candid impression is
desired we have no hesitation in saying that we believe him to have
been in Paris enjoying the sights of the great city during those
periods of solitude. Boys are boys in all lands, and a knowledge of
that peculiar species of human beings, the boarding-school boy, is
convincing that, given a prospect of five or six hours of
uninterrupted solitude, no youth of proper spirit would fail to avail
himself of the opportunities thus offered to see life, particularly
with a city like Paris within easy "hooky" distance.

It must also be remembered that the French had at this time
abolished the hereafter, along with the idea of a Deity and all
pertaining thereto, so that there was nothing beyond a purely
temporal discipline and lack of funds to interfere with Bonaparte's
enjoyment of all the pleasures which Paris could give. Of temporal
discipline he need have had no fear, since, it was perforce relaxed
while he was master of his solitude; as for the lack of funds,
history has shown that this never interfered with the fulfilment of
Napoleon's hopes, and hence the belief that the beautiful pictures,
drawn by historians and painted by masters of the brush, of Napoleon
in solitude should be revised to include a few accessories, drawn
from such portions of Parisian life as will readily suggest
themselves.

In his studies, however, Napoleon ranked high. His mathematical
abilities were so marked that it was stated that he could square the
circle with his eyes closed and both hands tied behind his back.

"The only circle I could not square at that time," said he, "was
the family circle, being insufficiently provided with income to do
so. I might have succeeded better had not Joseph's appetite grown
too fast for the strength of my pocket; that was the only respect,
however, in which I ever had any difficulty in keeping up with my
dear elder brother." It was here, too, that he learned the
inestimably important military fact that the shortest distance
between two points is in a straight line; and that he had fully
mastered that fact was often painfully evident to such of his
schoolmates as seemed to force him to measure with his right arm the
distance between his shoulder and the ends of their noses. Nor was
he utterly without wit. Asked by a cribbing comrade in examination
what a corollary was, Napoleon scornfully whispered back:

"A mathematical camel with two humps."

In German only was he deficient, much to the irritation of his
instructor.

"Will you ever learn anything?" asked M. Bouer, the German
teacher.

"Certainly," said Napoleon; "but no more German. I know the
only word I need in that language."

"And what, pray, is that?"

"Surrender; that's all I'll ever wish to say to the Germans.
But lest I get it wrong, pray tell me the imperative form of
surrender in your native tongue."

M. Bouer's reply is not known to history, but it was probably
not one which the Master of Etiquette at Brienne could have entirely
commended.

So he lived at Brienne, thoroughly mastering the science of war;
acquiring a military spirit; making no friends, but commanding
ultimately the fearsome respect of his school-mates. One or two
private interviews with little aristocrats who jeered at him for his
ancestry convinced them that while he might not have had illustrious
ancestors, it was not unlikely that he would in time develop
illustrious descendants, and the jeerings and sneerings soon ceased.
The climax of Bonaparte's career at Brienne was in 1784, when he
directed a snowball fight between two evenly divided branches of the
school with such effect that one boy had his skull cracked and the
rest were laid up for weeks from their wounds.

"It was a wonderful fight," remarked Napoleon, during his
campaign in Egypt. "I took good care that an occasional missent ball
should bowl off the hat of M. Bouer, and whenever any particularly
aristocratic aristocrat's head showed itself above the ramparts, an
avalanche fell upon his facade with a dull, sickening thud. I have
never seen an American college football game, but from all I can
learn from accounts in the Paris editions of the American newspapers
the effects physical in our fight and that game are about the
same."

In 1784, shortly after this episode, Napoleon left Brienne,
having learned all that those in authority there could teach him, and
in 1785 he applied for and received admission to the regular army,
much to the relief of Joseph.

"If he had flunked and come back to Corsica to live," said
Joseph, "I think I should have emigrated. I love him dearly, but I'm
fonder of myself, and Corsica, large as it is, is too small to
contain Napoleon Bonaparte and his brother Joseph simultaneously,
particularly as Joseph is distinctly weary of being used as an
understudy for a gory battle-field."