Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica by John Kendrick Bangs (good non fiction books to read TXT) 📖

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."



CHAPTER III: PARIS--VALENCE--LYONS--CORSICA 1785-1793

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