CHAPTER IV.

THE BOY NAPOLEON.

"I too am a mortal man Like others, born Of the race of him who was first made."

_Wisdom of Solomon._

We dwell with singular interest on the childhood of extraordinary men; the imagination pleases itself with the picture of the boy still lost among his play-fellows, and unconscious of his destiny. We are tempted to guess, in the physiognomy of the child, the traits that mark his future greatness as a man; but childhood is a deep mystery; who shall distinguish in the soul of a child the form of the genius or the demon that sleeps therein?—who prophesy of the mysterious power that is suddenly to determine the vast and slumbering forces, and send them forth commissioned into space and time?

I once saw in Florence the marble bust of a boy. The innocent smile on the childish face attracted me, and I contemplated it with pleasure. On the pedestal was inscribed: NERO.

Little is known of Napoleon's infancy. His mother Letitia was in church at the festival of the Assunta of the Virgin when she felt the first pangs of approaching labour. She immediately hastened home; but had not time to gain her own room, and gave birth to her child in a small cabinet, on a temporary couch of tapestry representing scenes from the Iliad. Gertrude, her sister-in-law, attended her. It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon when Napoleon came to the world.

He was not baptized till the 21st of July 1771, nearly two years after his birth, along with his sister Maria Anna, who died soon after. It is said that he resisted vehemently when the priest was about to sprinkle the consecrated water on him; perhaps he wanted to baptize himself, as at a later period he crowned himself, taking the crown from the hands of the Pope when he was about to set it on his head.

His boyhood showed symptoms of a vehement and passionate temperament, and he was at perpetual variance with his eldest brother Joseph. In these childish quarrels Joseph had always the worst of it, and was rudely handled; and when he ran to complain, Napoleon was declared to be in the right. Joseph became at last quite submissive to his younger brother, and the family began very early to look upon Napoleon as taking the lead among his brothers and sisters. The Archdeacon Lucian said to Joseph on his deathbed, "You are the oldest of the family, but there stands its head—you must not forget that."

We are willing enough to believe that the boy Napoleon showed a quite indomitable passion for everything military, and that this born soldier liked nothing so well as to run by the side of the soldiery of Ajaccio. The soldiers had a pleasure in seeing the boy go through the exercise beside them, and many a grayhaired veteran lifted him in his arms and caressed him for imitating the drill so valiantly. He teased his father till he purchased him a cannon, and the toy was long shown in the house of the Bonapartes with which he used to make his mimic battle-thunder, and play the cloud-compelling Jove. He soon began to exercise empire over the youth of Ajaccio, and, like Cyrus with the shepherd-boys of the Medes, and Peter the Great with his play-fellows, he formed the children of Ajaccio into a regiment of soldiers, who bravely took the field against the youngsters of the Borgo of Ajaccio, and fought sanguinary engagements with stones and wooden sabres.

In the year 1778, his father took him to the military school of Brienne, where the afterwards celebrated Pichegru was his master. It is known that Napoleon here at first showed himself quiet, gentle, and diligent. His impassioned temperament broke out only occasionally when his delicate sense of honour was touched. His quartermaster one day condemned him for some fault to eat his dinner on his knees in the woollen dress of disgrace, at the door of the refectory. Such a dinner was more than the pride of the young Corsican could stomach; he had an attack of vomiting and a fit. The Père Petrault immediately freed him from the punishment, and made it matter of complaint that his best mathematician was treated so shamefully.

In 1783, Napoleon went to the military school of Paris to complete his studies, already a completely-formed character, highly cultivated, glowing with the fires of genius and of youth, his head full of the heroes of his favourite Plutarch, and his heart penetrated with the deeds of his great Corsican forefathers. Society had already begun to ferment, and coming great events threw their shadow forward on the time. It was a period worth living in, heaving with mighty energies, big with change, and full of creative, Titanic impetuosity; it had given Nature the command to prepare great men.

The young officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, joined his regiment in Valence in the year 1785. His soul, profoundly though uncertainly stirred, needed expression. He wrote on the theme proposed for a prize essay by the Academy of Lyons: "What are the Principles and the Institutions which we must give to mankind to make them happy?"—a favourite subject in that humanistic period. Napoleon wrote anonymously. When he had become Emperor, and Talleyrand had extracted the paper from among the archives of Lyons to flatter the potentate, he threw it into the fire. Sentimentality was one of the features of the age, and we see that the young philanthropist did not escape without paying tribute to his time. What if Napoleon should have become the popular author of a sentimental romance in the vein of Richardson and Sterne? He had undertaken a journey to Mount Cenis with his friend Demarris, and on his return, agreeably excited by his little love-affair with Mademoiselle Colombier of Valence, who gave him secret rendezvous and very innocent banquets of cherries, he sat down to write a Sentimental Journey on Mount Cenis. He did not get far with it; but this fit of tender susceptibility in Napoleon is remarkable—and had he not "The Sorrows of Werther" with him in Egypt?

Still body and soul a Corsican, he also wrote in Valence a History of the Corsicans—a theme that suited the young Napoleon well. The manuscript exists in an incomplete state in the Library at Paris, and is now about to be published. Napoleon sent his manuscript to Paoli, whom he admired, and who was at that time living in exile in London. The following is part of the letter to his great countryman, which accompanied it:—

"I was born when our country died. Three thousand Frenchmen infesting our island, the throne of freedom sinking in waves of blood—such was the detested spectacle that first shocked my gaze. The groans of the dying, the sighs of the oppressed, the tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from the moment I was born.

"You left Corsica, and with you vanished the hopes of better fortune; slavery was the tribute we had to pay to conquest. Under an accumulation of burdens—under the threefold chain of the soldier, the legislator, and the tax-gatherer—our countrymen lived on in contempt,... despised by those who had the reins of government in their hands. Is not this the most cruel torture that any one possessed of feeling can have to suffer?

"The traitors to their country—the venal souls whom the love of base hire corrupts—have disseminated calumnies against the national Government, and against you personally. Authors adopt them, and transmit them as truths to posterity.

"Reading them, I was fired with indignation, and I have resolved to dissipate these mischievous falsehoods—the children of ignorance. An early-commenced study of the French language, attentive observation, and _memorabilia_ extracted from the papers of the patriots, put me in a position even to hope for some success.... I shall compare your Government with the present.... I shall paint the betrayers of the common cause, with the pencil of shame, in black.... I shall summon those in power before the bar of public opinion, give the minutest details of their vexatious system of oppression, disclose their secret intrigues, and, if possible, interest the virtuous minister who at present governs the State, for the lamentable fate which keeps us so cruelly prostrate."

Such are the sentiments and language of the young Corsican, Napoleon—the revolutionary democrat and scholar of Plutarch. In his History of the Corsicans, he says in one place: "When his country is no more, a high-spirited citizen should die." These were, in those days, no mere phrases from Tacitus; they were the glowing language of a young soul capable of all that was great and noble. There is hardly another character whose development—rapid as the flush of youth and genius can make it—we follow with the same passionate delight as we do that of the young hero, Napoleon, till about the peace of Campio Formio. We see a more than ordinary man—a demigod passing before us, still uncontaminated by the foul touch of selfishness—till the fair picture gradually becomes blurred, and we class it with those of ordinary despots. For no greatness endures, and Macchiavelli is right: "There are none but ordinary men." Other youthful literary attempts of Napoleon are mentioned by his biographers, and they are now to be printed; among them two novels, _Le Comte d'Essex_, and _Le Masque Prophête_, and a dialogue on Love, entitled _Giulio_.

Napoleon visited Ajaccio every year, and made his influence be felt on the education of his brothers and sisters. They were brought up simply, after the fashion of their country, and with a primitive strictness. "It was almost," says Nasica, "as if you were living in a convent. Prayers, sleep, study, refreshment, pleasure, promenade—everything went by rule and measure. The greatest harmony, a tender and sincere affection, prevailed among all the members of the family. It was in those days a pattern to the town, as it afterwards became its ornament and boast."

The Archdeacon Lucian managed the family affairs economically; and it cost the young Napoleon great exertion to obtain a little additional money to meet his expenses. But he obtained it. The whole family felt the influence of the young man, and was subject to the sway of this born ruler. It is characteristic—since empire was his destiny—that he, the second-born, has not only the mastery of his younger brothers and sisters, but even of his elder brother, and that his interference has a decisive effect on their upbringing. It was soon quite well understood that the young Napoleon was to be obeyed.

I find an authentic letter of Napoleon to his uncle Fesch, afterwards the Cardinal, dated from Brienne, the 15th July 1784. The boy of fifteen, in writing here as to the career on which his eldest brother Joseph ought to enter, speaks in the clearest and most sensible way of the circumstances necessary to be taken into account. The letter is sufficiently well worth reading—especially if we consider that the Joseph of whom so many doubts are therein expressed, afterwards became King of Spain.

NAPOLEON TO HIS UNCLE FESCH.

"MY DEAR UNCLE,—I write to inform you of the journey of my dear father over Brienne to Paris, where he has gone in order to take Marianne (afterwards Eliza of Tuscany) to St. Cyr, and to re-establish his health. He arrived here on the 21st with Lucian, and the two demoiselles whom you saw: he has left Lucian here. He is nine years old, and three feet, eleven inches, ten lines high: he is in the sixth in Latin, and will learn the various branches taught in this school; he shows much talent and willingness, and we may hope that something will come of him (_que ce sera un bon sujet_). [Lucian was the only one of the family who scorned a crown.] He is healthy, he is strong, lively, and thoughtless, and, in the meantime, his masters are content with him. He knows French very well, and has completely forgotten his Italian; but he will write to you along with this, and I shall say nothing to him, that you may see how matters stand with him.

"I hope he will write to you oftener now, than he did when he was in Autun.... I am confident my brother Joseph has not written to you yet. How could you expect it? He sends my dear father, when he does write to him, at most two lines. He is, in truth, quite changed. He writes to me, however, frequently. He is in the rhetoric class; and he would do better if he were diligent, for the master told my dear father that there was no one in the college (at Autun) who showed more talent than he in physics, rhetoric, or philosophy, or who could make so good a translation. In regard to the profession he is to follow, you know he at first chose the clerical. He kept by this resolution up till the present hour, but he now wishes to serve the king. In this he is wrong, on several grounds.

"1. As my father remarks, he has not courage to face the dangers of a battle; his weak health does not allow of his enduring the fatigues of a campaign; and my brother looks at the life of a soldier only from the garrison side. Yes, my dear brother will make an excellent officer in garrison. Well, as he is light-minded, and therefore clever at making frivolous compliments, he will always, with his talents, make a good figure in society—but in a battle? It is about this my dear father is dubious.

Qu'importe à des guerriers ces frivoles avantages? Que sont tous ces trésors sans celui du courage? A ce prix fussiez vous aussi beau qu'Adonis, Du Dieu même du Pinde eussiez-vous l'éloquence, Que sont tous ces dons sans celui de la vaillance?

"2. He has received an education for the clerical profession; it is too late to forget it. The Bishop of Autun would have given him a large benefice, and he was certain to have become a bishop. What an advantage for the family! The Bishop of Autun has done all he could to prevail on him to stay, and has promised him that he never would have cause to repent it. In vain!—he persists. I commend his resolution, if he has a decided taste for this profession—the finest of all professions—and if the Great Mover of human things (_le Grand Moteur des choses humaines_) had, in forming him, given him, as He has given me, a decided inclination for a military life.

"3. He wishes to obtain a commission; that is very well, but in what corps? In the marine, perhaps. 4. He knows nothing of mathematics. It would take him two years to learn them. 5. The sea does not agree with his health. Perhaps among the engineers? Then he would require four or five years to master what is necessary. Moreover, I think that to work and be occupied the whole day does not suit the levity of his disposition. The same reason exists for his not joining the artillery as for the engineers, with the exception that he would only have to work eighteen months to become _élève_, and as many to be made officer. Oh! but that is still not his taste. Let us see, then—doubtless he wishes to join the infantry. Good! I understand; he wants to have nothing to do the whole day but wear the pavement; but what is an insignificant infantry officer?—a _mauvais sujet_ for three-fourths of his time. And neither my father, nor you, nor my mother will hear of this, nor my uncle the archdeacon, for he has already given some little specimens of lightheadedness and extravagance. It follows that a last attempt must be made to gain him for the clerical profession; if this cannot be done, my dear father will take him with him to Corsica, where he will be under his own eye. They will try to make a law-clerk of him. I conclude by begging that you will continue your good-will towards me; to make myself worthy of it will be my chief and my most agreeable duty. I am, with the most profound respect, my dear uncle, your very devoted and very obedient servant and nephew,

"NAPOLEON DE BONAPARTE.

"_P.S._—Tear this letter.

"We may hope, nevertheless, that Joseph, with the talents he possesses, and the sentiments with which his education must have inspired him, will think better of it, and become the stay of our family. Represent to him a little these advantages."

Have we not almost a right to doubt that a boy of fifteen can have written so self-conscious, so clear and decisive a letter? It has never hitherto been published anywhere but in the work of Tommaseo—_Letters of Pasquale Paoli_—where I found it; the author says he owes it to Signor Lucgi Biadelli, councillor at the Supreme Court of Bastia. The letter appears to me to be an invaluable document; we seem to be present at the family council of the Bonapartes, and have all its members vividly before our eyes. Monsieur Fesch in Ajaccio, when he received the letter with the news about the giddy Joseph, wore his woollen blouse, and had his little wooden pipe in his mouth, precisely as many eye-witnesses remember to have seen him. Later, he wore the cardinal's hat; and the light-headed young Joseph became king of Spain.

We can recognise, in the Napoleon of this letter, the future tyrant of his family. We here find him caring for his brothers—pondering over their prospects; afterwards, he gave them kingly crowns, and demanded unconditional obedience. The plain citizen Lucian, and Louis King of Holland, alone withstood his tyranny.