But then, as you have heard before, Napoleon was an odd boy. He thought so himself when he grew to be a man, and he laughed at the recollection of his manners. He laid it all, however, to the responsibility he had felt, even from the day when he was a little fellow, because of the needs of his hard-pushed family in Corsica. "All these cares," he once said, looking back over his boy-life, "spoiled my early years; they influenced my temper, and made me grave before my time."
Even if he did not send that critical and most unwise letter for a boy of his standing, the insight he gained into the expensive ways of the pupils at the military school had its effect upon him; and the very criticisms of that remarkable letter were used for their original purpose when Napoleon came to authority and power. For, when he was emperor of France, he gave to the minister who had the military schools in charge this order: "No pupil is to cost the state more than twenty-five cents a day. These pupils are sons either of soldiers or of working-men; it is absolutely contrary to my intention to give them habits of life which can only be hurtful to them."
If Napoleon was so critical as to the ways and style of his schoolmates, he certainly set the lesson in economy for himself that he suggested for them.
To be sure, he had no money to waste or to spend; but he might have been hail-fellow with the other boys, and joined in their luxuries, had he but been willing to borrow, as did the rest of them. But Napoleon had always a horror of debt. He had acquired this from his mother's teachings and his father's spendthrift ways. Even as a boy, however, his will was so strong, his power of self-denial was so great, that he continued in what he considered the path of duty, unmindful of the boyish charges of "mean fellow" and "pauper" that the spoiled spendthrifts of the school had no hesitation in casting at him.
At last, however, these culminated almost in an open row; and Napoleon found himself called upon either to explain his position, or become both unpopular and an "outcast" because of what his schoolmates considered his stinginess and parsimony.
It was this way—But I had better tell you the story in a new chapter.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A TROUBLE OVER POCKET MONEY
It was the twelfth of June in the year 1785 that a group of scholars was standing, during the recess hour, in a corner of the military school of Paris.