"Yes?" he interrupted, eagerly.
"Try leopards!" she cried, rushing from his embrace into the house.
Bonaparte never forgave this exhibition of flippancy, though many years after, when he learned that his former love, who had married, as he had bade her do, and suffered, was face to face with starvation, it is said, on the authority of one of his ex-valet's memoirs, that he sent her a box of candied cherries from one of the most expensive confectionery-shops of Paris.
After a brief sojourn at Lyons, Napoleon was summoned with his regiment to quell certain popular tumults at Auxonne. There he distinguished himself as a handler of mobs, and learned a few things that were of inestimable advantage to him later. Speaking of it in after-years, he observed: "It is my opinion, my dear Emperor Joseph, that grape-shot is the only proper medicine for a mob. Some people prefer to turn the hose on them, but none of that for me. They fear water as they do death, but they get over water. Death is more permanent. I've seen many a rioter, made respectable by a good soaking, return to the fray after he had dried out, but in all my experience I have never known a man who was once punctured by a discharge of grape-shot who took any further interest in rioting."
About this time he began to regulate his taciturnity. On occasions he had opinions which he expressed most forcibly. In 1790, having gone to an evening reception at Madame Neckar's, he electrified his hostess and her guests by making a speech of some five hundred words in length, too long to be quoted here in full, but so full of import and delivered with such an air of authority that La Fayette, who was present, paled visibly, and Mirabeau, drawing Madame de Stael to one side, whispered, trembling with emotion, "Who is that young person?"
Whether this newly acquired tendency to break in upon the reserve which had hitherto been the salient feature of his speech had anything to do with it or not we are not aware, but shortly afterwards Napoleon deemed it wise to leave his regiment for a while, and to return to his Corsican home on furlough. Of course an affecting scene was enacted by himself and his family when they were at last reunited. Letitia, his fond mother, wept tears of joy, and Joseph, shaking him by the hand, rushed, overcome with emotion, from the house. Napoleon shortly after found him weeping in the garden.
"Why so sad, Joseph?" he inquired. "Are you sorry I have returned?"
"No, dear Napoleon," said Joseph, turning away his head to hide his tears, "it is not that. I was only weeping because—because, in the nature of things, you will have to go away again, and—the—the idea of parting from you has for the moment upset my equilibrium."
"Then we must proceed to restore it," said Napoleon, and, taking Joseph by the right arm, he twisted it until Joseph said that he felt quite recovered.
Napoleon's stay at Corsica was quite uneventful. Fearing lest by giving way to love of family, and sitting and talking with them in the luxuriously appointed parlor below-stairs, he should imbibe too strong a love for comfort and ease, and thus weaken his soldierly instincts, as well as break in upon that taciturnity which, as we have seen, was the keynote of his character, he had set apart for himself a small room on the attic floor, where he spent most of his time undisturbed, and at the same time made Joseph somewhat easier in his mind.