When Napoleon, in his last years, came to speak of his school days, he seemed to have forgotten all that was unpleasant. Time had swept its effacing fingers over the actual facts, and he had come to believe that he had not only been happy at Brienne, but had been a jolly, frolicksome fellow—a very cheerful, sociable, popular lad. It was some other youth who had shunned his fellows, fenced himself within a garden wall, combated all intruders with sticks and stones, and hated the French because they teased him so. The real Napoleon, according to the captive Emperor, was a boy like other boys, full of fun, frolic, tricks, and games. One of the sportive tricks of the merry and mythical Bonaparte was this: An old commandant, upward of eighty, was practising the boys at target-shooting with a cannon. He complained that the aim was bad, none of the balls hit the target. Presently, he asked of those near him if they had seen the ball strike. After half a dozen discharges, the old general bethought himself of counting the balls. Then the trick was exposed—the boys had slipped the balls aside each time the gun was loaded.
Another anecdote told by the Emperor brings him more immediately within the circle of our sympathies. Just above his own room at the college was a fellow-student who was learning to play on the horn. He practised loudly, and at all hours. Napoleon found it impossible to study. Meeting the student on the stairs, Napoleon feelingly remonstrated. The horn player was in a huff at once, as a matter of course. His room was his own, and he would blow horns in it as much as he pleased. “We will see about that,” said Napoleon, and he challenged the offender to mortal combat. Death could have no terrors compared to the incessant tooting in the room above, and Napoleon was determined to take his chances on sudden sword thrust rather than the slow tortures of the horn practice. Fellow-students interfered, a compromise was reached, and the duel did not come off. The student who roused the ire of Napoleon in this extreme manner was named Bussey, and in the campaign of 1814 Napoleon met him again, received offers of service from him, and named him aide-de-camp. It is a pleasure to be able to record that this fellow-student of Brienne remained faithful to Napoleon to the very last, in 1814 and again in 1815.
In the year 1810 the Emperor Napoleon, divorced from Josephine, was spending a few days in seclusion in the Trianon at Versailles, awaiting the coming of the Austrian wife, “the daughter of the Cæsars.” Hortense and Stephanie Beauharnais were with him, and Stephanie mischievously asked him if he knew how to waltz. Napoleon answered:—
“When I was at the military school I tried, I don’t know how many times, to overcome the vertigo caused by waltzing, without being able to succeed. Our dancing-master had advised us when practising to take a chair in our arms instead of a lady. I never failed to fall down with the chair, which I squeezed affectionately, and to break it. The chairs in my room, and those of two or three of my comrades, disappeared one after another.”
The Emperor told this story in his gayest manner, and the two ladies laughed, of course; but Stephanie insisted that he should even now learn to waltz, that all Germans waltzed, that his new wife would expect it, and that as the Empress could only dance with the Emperor, he must not deprive her of such a pleasure.
“You are right,” exclaimed Napoleon. “Come! give me a lesson.”
Thereupon he rose, took the merry Stephanie in his arms, and went capering around the room to the music of his own voice, humming the air of The Queen of Prussia. After two or three turns, his fair teacher gave him up in despair; he was too hopelessly awkward; and she flattered him, while pronouncing him a failure, by saying that he was made to give lessons and not receive them.
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Toward the close of 1783 a royal inspector of the military schools, Keralio by name, examined the students at Brienne for the purpose of selecting those who were to be promoted to the higher military school at Paris. M. de Keralio was greatly impressed by Napoleon, and emphatically recommended his promotion. This inspector having died, his successor examined Napoleon the second time, and passed him on to the Paris school, which he entered on October 30, 1784. On the certificate which went with him from Brienne were the words, “Character masterful, imperious, and headstrong.”
When Napoleon alighted from the coach which brought him from Brienne to Paris, and stood, a tiny foreign boy, in the midst of the hurly-burly of a great city, he must have felt himself one of the loneliest and most insignificant of mortals. Demetrius Permon found him in the Palais Royal, “where he was gaping and staring with wonder at everything he saw. Truly, he looked like a fresh importation.” M. Permon invited the lad to dine, and found him “very morose,” and feared that he had “more self-conceit than was suitable to his condition.” Napoleon made this impression upon Permon by declaiming violently against the luxury of the young men at the military school, denouncing the system of education which prevailed there, comparing it unfavorably to the system of ancient Sparta, and announcing his intention of memorializing the minister of war on the subject.