“Only the sword-belt belongs to France; the edge is my own,” thinks the youth, as he first buckles on his sword. At sixteen he has become a sub-lieutenant—and he will don uniform a good many more times before he dies. He has qualified for this rank by a year in the Paris Cadets’ School, where he spent his time as he had spent it at Brienne, poring over books. A lad of Spartan tastes, he finds the prodigal expenditure of the sprigs of the French nobility (by whom he is utterly outshone) extremely distasteful. Since, however, nature sets him, even more than most young men, in the centre of his own world, he makes a virtue of necessity, and pens a memorial to the effect that luxurious living is unsuitable for budding soldiers. He must not get into debt, for he knows how poor they are at home. Now, when his father dies, the family affection of this Italian becomes intensified. Though little more than a boy, he begins to save money in order to help his mother.

After his examination, passed with fair credit, his superiors wrote of him: “Reserved and diligent, he prefers study to any kind of conversation, and nourishes his mind upon good authors.... He is taciturn, with a love for solitude; is moody, overbearing, and extremely egotistical. Though he speaks little, his answers are decisive and to the point, and he excels in argument. Much self-love, and overweening ambition.”

Clad in his new uniform, the little sub-lieutenant goes to join his regiment at Valence, compelled by his poverty to walk a great part of the way. Three impulses stir his youthful heart: to despise and make use of his fellow-creatures, most of whom are empty-headed and pretentious; to extricate himself from the clutches of poverty; to learn much in order that he may rule others. The means and the goal are one. He is to be a leader in the struggle on the island, and then to make himself master of Corsica.

How dull life is in this garrison town! Of course, a young man should learn to dance, should taste the pleasures of lively society. He tries this, but soon abandons the attempt, for his teeming pride makes him want to hide his poverty. However, any one who holds converse with members of the burgher class, lawyers and shopkeepers, hears strange talk, gets wind of things that the young viscounts in Paris never dream of. Is it really true? Has the spirit of Voltaire’s and Montesquieu’s, and Raynal’s writings actually climbed down so soon, to stalk among the provincial petty bourgeois? Is the movement which these prophets were conjuring up now seriously afoot? Can it be that the revolution is at hand?

Books clamour it abroad. Reading is free as breathing; and when a man has read all the books in the lending library, he can spare a franc or two now and again to buy a new book. True, the youth lodges in a café, and the clicking of the billiard balls in the next room is tiresome. But it would be still more tiresome to move. In personal habits, he is conservative.

What about his sentiments? Judge for yourselves. Like every young man of his generation, he is keenly interested in the State and society. There he sits in the room next the billiard-room; pale, lonely, in a hot and stuffy atmosphere. While his comrades, after their short hours of duty, scatter to seek distraction in gaming or the pursuit of women, the impoverished lieutenant bends over his books, reading with sure instinct about the things (and those only) that will be of use to him in days to come: artillery, its principles and its history; the art of siege; Plato’s _Republic_; the constitution of the Persian, the Athenian, the Spartan State; the history of England; the campaigns of Frederick the Great; French finances; the Tartars and the Turks, their manners and customs, and the topography of their countries; the history of Egypt and the history of Carthage; descriptions of India; English accounts of contemporary France: Mirabeau, Buffon, and Machiavelli; the history and the constitution of Switzerland; the history and constitution of China, India, the Inca State; the history of the nobility and the story of patrician misdeeds; astronomy, geology, and meteorology; the laws of the growth of population; statistics of mortality.

He did not simply flutter the pages of his books, but was an attentive reader. There is extant a whole series of copy-books containing Napoleon’s notes, penned in an almost illegible handwriting. The contents of these, reprinted, occupies four hundred pages. Here we find a map of the Saxon heptarchy with a list of the kings for three centuries; item, the varieties of foot-race in ancient Crete; item, lists of the Hellenic fortresses in Asia Minor; item, the dates of twenty-seven caliphs, with a note of the strength of their cavalry, and an account of the misconduct of their wives.

Especially frequent are memoranda concerning Egypt and India, including even the measurements of the Great Pyramid and a catalogue of Brahminical sects. He copies a passage from Raynal: “In view of the position of Egypt, lying betwixt two seas, and in fact betwixt the East and the West, Alexander the Great conceived the design of establishing the capital of his worldwide empire in that country, and of making Egypt the centre of world commerce. This most enlightened of the conquerors had realised that if there was any practicable way of amalgamating his conquests into one consolidated State, it was by this use of Egypt, created as a point of union between Africa, Asia, and Europe.” Thirty years later, he still had the words by heart. He had read them so often.

At this date, too, he begins original composition, drafting more than a dozen essays and projects: the placing of artillery; suicide; monarchical authority; the inequality of men; and Corsica, above all, Corsica—each were the topics. Rousseau, the most popular author of those days, is pulverised by Napoleon’s realism. The young officer is epitomising Rousseau’s views on the origin of the human race (in the _Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes_), but abruptly he breaks off the epitome with the comment: “I don’t believe a word of this.” Then come a couple of pages filled with his own counterstatement. Human beings were not, to begin with, solitary; nor were they nomadic. They were happy, and lived apart, because they were not numerous enough to be forced into close contact. When the population grew more thick upon the ground, “then imagination came forth from the cave in which for so long it had been prisoned: self-confidence, passion, and pride reared their heads; there arose ambitious men with pale features, who took control of affairs, and mastered the multicoloured young popinjays, the Lotharios and lady-killers.”

Do not we already hear him rattling his chains, in the dark cavern where he himself is prisoned with his titanic imagination? Do not we see the fancy portrait of the young author, pale of visage, full of hatred for the brilliant lady-killers who are his messmates?

Away from these fellows, who are Frenchmen! His gaze is still fixed upon his native isle, and it is to the advantage of Corsica that he twists the new sociological outlooks. We read in one of the essays: “How absurd to declare that divine laws forbid us to shake off a usurper’s yoke! Were that so, then every regicide who has clambered into the vacant throne would be under God’s protection, whereas in case of failure he would have lost his head. With how much better right, then, can a people drive out a usurping prince! Does not this speak for Corsicans?... Thus we can shake off the yoke of France, just as we shook off the yoke of Genoa. Amen.”

Meanwhile, the fledgling genius wished to try its wings, and this urge led Napoleon to draft a novel on Corsica, and also some short stories. All were animated by hatred of France, but none of them were ever finished. Still he was learning his trade, spurred on by poverty, passion, and sentiment. Imagination rules the world, but cannons are the instrument whereby imagination realises its purposes. “I have no refuge but my work. I only change my linen once a week. Since I was ill, I have slept very little.... I eat only once a day.”

He studies ordnance and munitions of war, always thinking in figures, so that every one says that he is a born mathematician. Now, side by side with the drafts of works of imagination, he draws up specifications of all the localities in the island where he would place batteries, dig trenches, station troops—if he had but the power! Beneath the network of poetical thoughts with which he has covered the island, he spreads over his maps a second network, wherein crosses denote big guns. Maps, maps! In his room beside the noisy café, he restudies everything conceivable, copies whole speeches out of the report of the parliamentary proceedings at Westminster, and sketches the remotest parts of the earth. At the end of the last of his copy-books, the final entry runs: “St. Helena, a small island in the Atlantic Ocean. English colony.”

At this juncture he received a letter from his mother. Her powerful patron, the marshal, was dead; the house had lost its main prop; the mulberry orchard was no longer to be a means of livelihood; Joseph had no paid occupation; could the second son give any help? Shortly after this appeal reached him, he went home on furlough. Are we to consider him an unacknowledged conqueror, returning to the island of his plans and dreams? Read what he wrote in his diary:

“Always alone, though in the midst of men, I go back home that I may give myself up to my lonely dreams and to the waves of my melancholy. Whither, now, do my gloomy thoughts tend? Towards death. Yet I stand on the threshold of life, and may reasonably expect to draw breath for many, many years. For the last six or seven years I have been far away from my country. How great the joy—to see my own people once more!—What demon, then, is it that tempts me to self-destruction?—Since misfortune dogs my footsteps, and nothing gives me pleasure, why should I go on bearing a life in which, for me, everything goes awry?—What a tragedy in the homeland? My fellow-countrymen, in chains, kiss the hand that beats them.—Proud, buoyed up by a sense of his own worth, so lived of yore the happy Corsican, giving his days to the service of the State, and spending his nights in the arms of his beloved wife—the nights which nature and affection made divine for him. With the disappearance of freedom, those happy times have vanished like a dream. Frenchmen, not only have you stolen from us our greatest good, but now you are corrupting our morals! That is how I see my country, and yet I am powerless to help. Are there not reasons enough for quitting a world in which I must glorify those whom I hate?—If it were but the life of one individual which stood between us and our liberties, I should not be slow to act.—Life has become a burden to me, I have no enjoyment, nothing but pain,—and because I cannot live after my own fashion, everything is loathsome to me.”