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.