"A man, are you!" he cried. "Then, why not be a man, and not a baby?"
"Bah, rascal! and who is the greater baby?" his brother responded. "It is he who cries the loudest when things go wrong; and I never cry."
Joseph said nothing further except, "Good-by, obstinate one!"
"Good-by," lisped baby Lucien.
But Eliza said nothing. She did not even glance at Napoleon as she passed him; and he simply looked at her, without a word of accusation or farewell.
The three days passed quietly, though hungrily, for Napoleon. Uncle Lucien said nothing to influence the boy, though he looked sadly, and sometimes wistfully, at him; and Pauline tried to sweeten the bread and water and cheese as much as possible by her sympathy and companionship.
Of this last, however, Napoleon did not wish much. He spent much of the time in his grotto, brooding over his wrongs, and thinking how he would act if people tried to treat him thus when he became a man.
The second day he dragged his toy cannon to his grotto, and made believe he was a Corsican patriot, intrenched in his fortifications, and holding the whole French army at bay; for though Corsica was a French possession, the people were still smarting under their wrongs, and hated their French oppressors, as they termed them. Some years after, when he was a young man, Napoleon, talking about the home of his boyhood and the troubles of Corsica, said, "I was born while my country was dying. Thirty thousand French thrown upon our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in blood—such was the horrid sight that first met my view. The cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle at my birth."
It was not quite as bad as all that. But Napoleon liked to use big words and dramatic phrases. It had been, in fact, very much like this before Napoleon was born. He had heard all the stories of French tyranny and Corsican courage, and, like a true Corsican, was hot with wrath against the enslavers of his country, as he called the French. So he found an especial pleasure in bombarding all France with his toy gun from his grotto; and as he then felt very bitter indeed because of his treatment at home, you may be sure the French army was horribly butchered in the boy's make-believe battle before Napoleon's grotto.
Then he went back for his bread and water.