Chapter III: Paris--Valence--Lyons--Corsica. 1785-1793

Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica

by John Kendrick Bangs

The feeling among the larger boys at Brienne at Napoleon's
departure was much the same as that experienced by Joseph when his
soon to-be- famous brother departed from Corsica. The smaller boys
regretted his departure, since it had been one of their greatest
pleasures to watch Napoleon disciplining the upper classmen, but
Bonaparte was as glad to go as the elders were to have him.

"Brienne is good enough in its way," said he; "but what's the
use of fighting children? It's merely a waste of time cracking a
youngster's skull with a snowball when you can go out into the real
world and let daylight into a man's whole system with a few ounces of
grape-shot."

He had watched developments at Paris, too, with the keenest
interest, and was sufficiently far-seeing to know that the troubles
of the King and Queen and their aristocratic friends boded well for a
man fond of a military life who had sense enough to be on the right
side. That it took an abnormal degree of intelligence to know which
was the right side in those troublous days he also realized, and
hence he cultivated that taciturnity and proneness to irritability
which we have already mentioned.

"If it had not been for my taciturnity, Talleyrand," he
observed, when in the height of his power, "I should have got it in
the neck."

"Got what in the neck?" asked Talleyrand.

"The guillotine," rejoined the Emperor. "It was the freedom of
speech which people of those sanguinary days allowed themselves that
landed many a fine head in the basket. As for me, I simply held my
tongue with both hands, and when I wearied of that I called some one
in to hold it for me. If I had filled the newspapers with
'Interviews with Napoleon Bonaparte,' and articles on 'Where is
France at?' with monographs in the leading reviews every month on
'Why I am what I am,' and all such stuff as that, I'd have condensed
my career into one or two years, and ended by having my head divorced
from my shoulders in a most commonplace fashion. Taciturnity is a
big thing when you know how to work it, and so is proneness to
irritability. The latter keeps you from making friends, and I didn't
want any friends just then. They were luxuries which I couldn't
afford. You have to lend money to friends; you have to give them
dinners and cigars, and send bonbons to their sisters. A friend in
those days would have meant bankruptcy of the worst sort.
Furthermore, friends embarrass you when you get into public office,
and try to make you conspicuous when you'd infinitely prefer to saw
wood and say nothing. I took my loneliness straight, and that is one
of the reasons why I am now the Emperor of France, and your
master."

Before entering the army a year at a Parisian military school
kept Bonaparte busy. There, as at Brienne, he made his influence
felt. He found his fellow-pupils at Paris living in a state of luxury
that was not in accord with his ideas as to what a soldier should
have. Whether or not his new school-mates, after the time-honored
custom, tossed him in a blanket on the first night of his arrival,
history does not say, but Bonaparte had hardly been at the school a
week when he complained to the authorities that there was too much
luxury in their system for him.

"Cadets do not need feather-beds and eider-down quilts," he
said; "and as for the sumptuous viands we have served at mealtime,
they are utterly inappropriate. I'd rather have a plate of Boston
baked beans or steaming buckwheat cakes to put my mind into that
state which should characterize the thinking apparatus of a soldier
than a dozen of the bouchees financieres and lobster Newburgs and
other made- dishes which you have on your menu. Made-dishes and
delicate beverages make one mellow and genial of disposition. What
we need is the kind of food that will destroy our amiability and put
us in a frame of mind calculated to make willing to kill our best
friends-- nay, our own brothers and sisters--if occasion arises, with
a smiling face. Look at me. I could kill my brother Joseph, dear as
he is to me, and never shed a tear, and it's buckwheat-cakes and
waffles that have done it!"

Likewise he abhorred dancing.

"Away with dancing men!" he cried, impatiently, at one time when
in the height of his power, to his Minister of War. "Suppose when I
was crossing the Alps my soldiers had been of your dancing sort. How
far would I have got if every time the band played a two-step my
grenadiers had dropped their guns to pirouette over those snow-white
wastes? Let the diplomats do the dancing. For soldiers give me men
to whom the polka is a closed book and the waltz an abomination."

Holding these views, he naturally failed to win the sympathy of
his fellows at the Paris school who, young nobles for the most part,
could not understand his point of view. So, having nothing else to
do, he applied himself solely to his studies and to reflection, and
it was the happiest moment of his life up to that time when, having
passed his examinations for entrance to the regular army, he received
his commission as a second lieutenant.

"Now we're off!" he said to himself, as he surveyed himself in
the mirror, after donning his uniform.

"It does not set very well in the back," remarked one of the
maids of the pension in which he lived, glancing in at the door.

"It does not matter," returned Bonaparte, loftily. "As long as
it sets well in front I'm satisfied; for you should know, madame,
that a true soldier never shows his back, and that is the kind of a
military person I am. A false front would do for me. I am no tin
soldier, which in after-years it will interest you to remember. When
you are writing your memoirs this will make an interesting
anecdote."

From this it is to be inferred that at this time he had no
thought of Moscow. Immediately after his appointment Bonaparte
repaired to Valence, where his regiment was stationed and where he
formed a strong attachment for the young daughter of Madame du
Colombier, with whom, history records, he ate cherries before
breakfast. This was his sole dissipation at that time, but his
felicity was soon to be interrupted. His regiment was ordered to
Lyons, and Bonaparte and his love were parted.

"Duty calls me, my dear," he said, on leaving her. "I would
stay if I could, but I can't, and, on the whole, it is just as well.
If I stayed I should marry you, and that would never do. You cannot
support me, nor I you. We cannot live on cherries, and as yet my
allowance is an ingrowing one--which is to say that it goes from me
to my parent, and not from my parent to me. Therefore, my only love,
farewell. Marry some one else. There are plenty of men who are fond
of cherries before breakfast, and there is no reason why one so
attractive as you should not find a lover."

The unhappy girl was silent for a moment. Then, with an ill-
suppressed sob, she bade him go.

"You are right, Napoleon," she said. "Go. Go where duty calls
you, and if you get tired of Lyons--"

"Yes?" he interrupted, eagerly.

"Try leopards!" she cried, rushing from his embrace into the
house.

Bonaparte never forgave this exhibition of flippancy, though
many years after, when he learned that his former love, who had
married, as he had bade her do, and suffered, was face to face with
starvation, it is said, on the authority of one of his ex-valet's
memoirs, that he sent her a box of candied cherries from one of the
most expensive confectionery-shops of Paris.

After a brief sojourn at Lyons, Napoleon was summoned with his
regiment to quell certain popular tumults at Auxonne. There he
distinguished himself as a handler of mobs, and learned a few things
that were of inestimable advantage to him later. Speaking of it in
after-years, he observed: "It is my opinion, my dear Emperor Joseph,
that grape-shot is the only proper medicine for a mob. Some people
prefer to turn the hose on them, but none of that for me. They fear
water as they do death, but they get over water. Death is more
permanent. I've seen many a rioter, made respectable by a good
soaking, return to the fray after he had dried out, but in all my
experience I have never known a man who was once punctured by a
discharge of grape-shot who took any further interest in rioting."

About this time he began to regulate his taciturnity. On
occasions he had opinions which he expressed most forcibly. In 1790,
having gone to an evening reception at Madame Neckar's, he
electrified his hostess and her guests by making a speech of some
five hundred words in length, too long to be quoted here in full, but
so full of import and delivered with such an air of authority that La
Fayette, who was present, paled visibly, and Mirabeau, drawing Madame
de Stael to one side, whispered, trembling with emotion, "Who is that
young person?"

Whether this newly acquired tendency to break in upon the
reserve which had hitherto been the salient feature of his speech had
anything to do with it or not we are not aware, but shortly
afterwards Napoleon deemed it wise to leave his regiment for a while,
and to return to his Corsican home on furlough. Of course an
affecting scene was enacted by himself and his family when they were
at last reunited. Letitia, his fond mother, wept tears of joy, and
Joseph, shaking him by the hand, rushed, overcome with emotion, from
the house. Napoleon shortly after found him weeping in the
garden.

"Why so sad, Joseph?" he inquired. "Are you sorry I have
returned?"

"No, dear Napoleon," said Joseph, turning away his head to hide
his tears, "it is not that. I was only weeping because--because, in
the nature of things, you will have to go away again, and--the--the
idea of parting from you has for the moment upset my equilibrium."

"Then we must proceed to restore it," said Napoleon, and, taking
Joseph by the right arm, he twisted it until Joseph said that he felt
quite recovered.

Napoleon's stay at Corsica was quite uneventful. Fearing lest
by giving way to love of family, and sitting and talking with them in
the luxuriously appointed parlor below-stairs, he should imbibe too
strong a love for comfort and ease, and thus weaken his soldierly
instincts, as well as break in upon that taciturnity which, as we
have seen, was the keynote of his character, he had set apart for
himself a small room on the attic floor, where he spent most of his
time undisturbed, and at the same time made Joseph somewhat easier in
his mind.

"When he's up-stairs I am comparatively safe," said Joseph. "If
he stayed below with us I fear I should have a return of my nervous
prostration."

Meantime, Napoleon was promoted to a first lieutenancy, and
shortly after, during the Reign of Terror in Paris, having once more
for the moment yielded to an impulse to speak out in meeting, he
denounced anarchy in unmeasured terms, and was arrested and taken to
Paris.

"It was a fortunate arrest for me," he said. "There I was in
Corsica with barely enough money to pay my way back to the capital.
Arrested, the State had to pay my fare, and I got back to active
political scenes on a free pass. As for the trial, it was a farce,
and I was triumphantly acquitted. The jury was out only fifteen
minutes. I had so little to say for myself that the judges began to
doubt if I had any ideas on any subject--or, as one of them said,
having no head to mention, it would be useless to try and cut it off.
Hence my acquittal and my feeling that taciturnity is the mother of
safety."

Then came the terrible attack of the mob upon the Tuileries on
the 20th of June, 1792. Napoleon was walking in the street with
Bourrienne when the attack began.

"There's nothing like a lamp-post for an occasion like this, it
broadens one's views so," he said, rapidly climbing up a convenient
post, from which he could see all that went on. "I didn't know that
this was the royal family's reception-day. Do you want to know what
I think?"

"Mumm is the word," whispered Bourrienne. "This is no time to
have opinions."

"Mumm may be the word, but water is the beverage. Mumm is too
dry. What this crowd needs is a good wetting down," retorted
Bonaparte. "If I were Louis XVI. I'd turn the hose on these tramps,
and keep them at bay until I could get my little brass cannon loaded.
When I had that loaded, I'd let them have a few balls hot from the
bat. This is what comes of being a born king. Louis doesn't know how
to talk to the people. He's all right for a state-dinner, but when
it comes to a mass-meeting he is not in it."

And then as the King, to gratify the mob, put the red cap of
Jacobinism upon his head, the man who was destined before many years
to occupy the throne of France let fall an ejaculation of wrath.

"The wretches!" he cried. "How little they know! They've only
given him another hat to talk through! They'll have to do their work
all over again, unless Louis takes my advice and travels abroad for
his health."

These words were prophetic, for barely two months later the
second and most terrible and portentous attack upon the palace took
place-- an attack which Napoleon witnessed, as he had witnessed the
first, from a convenient lamp-post, and which filled him with disgust
and shame; and it was upon that night of riot and bloodshed that he
gave utterance to one of his most famous sayings.

"Bourrienne," said he, as with his faithful companions he
laboriously climbed the five flights of stairs leading to his humble
apartment, "I hate the aristocrats, as you know; and to-day has made
me hate the populace as well. What is there left to like?"

"Alas! lieutenant, I cannot say," said Bourrienne, shaking his
head sadly.

"What," continued Napoleon, "is the good of anything?"

"I give it up," returned Bourrienne, with a sigh. "I never was
good at riddles. What is the good of anything?"

"Nothing!" said Napoleon, laconically, as he took off his
uniform and went to bed.