"Cecile, who was twelve or thirteen years of age, was highly indignant at being called a child, and she hastily resented the affront by replying to Bonaparte, 'And you are nothing but a Puss in Boots!'"
Napoleon at this time was hard put to it to keep up appearances as an officer, on his slender income. His father had passed away, and he could not expect further help from home. He was now his mother's oldest adviser, and we find him writing her sage letters which sound like a man of forty. Indeed, his brain matured early. At fourteen he wrote and spoke like a man.
He was subject to fits of depression and melancholy, and even thoughts of suicide—but these, fortunately, were passing whims, and gradually the resolute nature he was to evince in later years began to assert itself. A favorite motto with him, as a man, was: "The truest wisdom is a resolute determination," and already he was putting it into practice.
Soon after obtaining his commission, he left school on his first assignment of active duty. Some riots had broken out at Lyons, and his regiment of artillery was sent there. But things speedily quieted down, leaving to him the monotony of garrison life. In telling about it afterward he remarked:
"When I entered the service I found garrison life tedious. I began reading novels, and that kind of reading proved interesting. I made an attempt at writing some; this task gave range to my imagination. It took hold of my knowledge of positive facts, and often I found amusement in giving myself up to dreams in order to test them later by the standard of my reasoning powers. I transported myself in thought to an ideal world, and I sought to discover wherein lay the precise difference between that and the world in which I lived."
Thus we see in the young soldier the same recluse and dreamer of Brienne. In boyhood parlance today, he "flocked by himself," building air castles which in part were to become reality.
As for his early attempts at authorship, he tried his hand with indifferent success at fiction, essays, and history, but it is said that he destroyed all this work, with the exception of a fragment, "Letters on the History of Corsica," which was to have told the story of his beloved island.
He returned home on a visit not long after, to help his mother settle up the family estate. Her means were very meagre, and her family unusually large. In addition, his father's affairs had become involved. He had been advanced some money by the French Government to plant mulberry trees, in connection with the silk-worm industry, and a part of this advance was as yet unpaid.
On the score of ill health Napoleon prolonged his stay at Ajaccio for some months, and did not rejoin his regiment until the spring of 1788. He stayed on the island to aid the family from his own pay, and to get a further advance on the mulberry grove; and also as a means of getting away from other people. He was a pronounced recluse, indulging in long rambles over the island, and finding his sole pleasure in authorship. Upon the very threshold of his public career, he still appeared as the most unlikely object upon which Fortune would bestow her favor.
And as if there were not barriers enough to his success, he was still an alien in heart, from France. He wore her uniform and served under her flag, but he was Corsican through and through—still resenting with a Southern impetuosity the means by which the French had conquered Corsica.