[TABLE-TALK OF NAPOLEON BONAPARTE.]
When Napoleon was about fourteen, he was conversing with a lady about Marshal Turenne, and extolling him to the skies.
“Yes, my friend,” she answered, “he was a great man; but I should like him better if he had not burnt the Palatinate.”
“What does that matter,” he replied briskly, “if the burning was necessary to the success of his plans?”
Napoleon’s German master, a heavy and phlegmatic man, who thought the study of German the only one necessary to a man’s success in life, finding Napoleon absent from his class one day, asked where he was. He was told he was undergoing his examination for the artillery.
“Does he know anything then?” he asked ironically.
“Why, sir, he is the best mathematician in the school.”
“Well,” was his sage remark, “I have always heard say, and I always thought, that mathematics was a study only suitable to fools.”