spent in energetic efforts to better his family’s situation, working to reëstablish salt works and a mulberry plantation in which they were concerned, to secure the nomination of Lucien to the college at Aix, and to place Louis at a French military school.
When he went back to his regiment, now stationed at Auxonne, he denied himself to send money home, and spent his leisure in desperate work, sleeping but six hours, eating but one meal a day, dressing once in the week. Like all the young men of the country who had been animated by the philosophers and encyclopedists, he had attempted literature, and at this moment was finishing a history of Corsica, a portion of which he had written at Valence and submitted to the Abbé Raynal, who had encouraged him to go on. The manuscript was completed and ready for publication in 1788, and the author made heroic efforts to find some one who would accept a dedication, as well as some one who would publish it. Before he had succeeded, events had crowded the work out of sight, and other ambitions occupied his forces. Napoleon had many literary projects on hand at this time. He had been a prodigious reader, and was never so happy as when he could save a few cents with which to buy second-hand books. From everything he read he made long extracts, and kept a book of “thoughts.” Most curious are some of these fragments, reflections on the beginning of society, on love, on nature. They show that he was passionately absorbed in forming ideas on the great questions of life and its relations.
Besides his history of Corsica, he had already written several fragments, among them an historical drama called the “Count of Essex,” and a story, the “Masque Prophète.” He undertook, too, to write a sentimental journey in the style of Sterne, describing a trip from Valence to Mont Cenis. Later he competed for a prize offered by the Academy of Lyons on the subject: “To determine what truths and feelings should be inculcated in men for their happiness.” He failed in the contest; indeed, the essay was severely criticised for its incoherency and poor style.
The Revolution of 1789 turned Napoleon’s mind to an ambition greater than that of writing the history of Corsica—he would free Corsica. The National Assembly had lifted the island from its inferior relation and made it a department of France, but sentiment was much divided, and the ferment was similar to that which agitated the mainland. Napoleon, deeply interested in the progress of the new liberal ideas, and seeing, too, the opportunity for a soldier and an agitator among his countrymen, hastened home, where he spent some twenty-five months out of the next two and a half years. That the young officer spent five-sixths of his time in Corsica, instead of in service, and that he in more than one instance pleaded reasons for leaves of absence which one would have to be exceedingly unsophisticated not to see were trumped up for the occasion, cannot be attributed merely to duplicity of character and contempt for authority. He was doing only what he had learned to do at the military schools of Brienne and Paris, and what he saw practised about him in the army. Indeed, the whole French army at that period made a business of shirking duty. Every minister of war in the period complains of the incessant desertions among the common soldiers. Among the officers it was no better. True, they did not desert; they held their places and—did nothing. “Those who were rich and well born had no need to work,” says the Marshal Duc de Broglie. “They were promoted by favoritism. Those who were poor and from the provinces had no need to work either. It did them no good if they did, for, not having patronage, they could not advance.” The Comte de Saint-Germain said in regard to the officers: “There is not one who is in active service; they one and all amuse themselves and look out for their own affairs.”
Napoleon, tormented by the desire to help his family, goaded by his ambition and by an imperative inborn need of action and achievement, still divided in his allegiance between France and Corsica, could not have been expected, in his environment, to take nothing more than the leaves allowed by law.
Revolutionary agitation did not absorb all the time he was in Corsica. Never did he work harder for his family. The portion of this two and a half years which he spent in France, he was accompanied by Louis, whose tutor he had become, and he suffered every deprivation to help him. Napoleon’s income at that time was sixty-five cents a day. This meant that he must live in wretched rooms, prepare himself the broth on which he and his brother dined, never go to a café, brush his own clothes, give Louis lessons. He did it bravely. “I breakfasted off dry bread, but I bolted my door on my poverty,” he said once to a young officer complaining of the economies he must make on two hundred dollars a month.
BONAPARTE AT THE TUILERIES, AUGUST 10, 1792.
Economy and privation were always more supportable to him than borrowing. He detested irregularities in financial matters. “Your finances are deplorably conducted, apparently on metaphysical principles. Believe me, money is a very physical thing,” he once said to Joseph, when the latter, as King of Naples, could not make both ends meet. He put Jerome to sea largely to stop his reckless expenditures. (At fifteen that young man paid three thousand two hundred dollars for a shaving case “containing everything except the beard to enable its owner to use it.”) Some of the most furious scenes which occurred between Napoleon and Josephine were because she was continually in debt. After the divorce he frequently cautioned her to be watchful of her money. “Think what a bad opinion I should have of you if I knew you were in debt with an income of six hundred thousand dollars a year,” he wrote her in 1813.
The methodical habits of Marie Louise were a constant satisfaction to Napoleon. “She settles all her accounts once a week, deprives herself of new gowns if necessary, and imposes privations upon herself in order to keep out of debt,” he said proudly. A bill of sixty-two francs and thirty-two centimes was once sent to him for window blinds placed in the salon of the Princess Borghese. “As I did not order this expenditure, which ought not to be charged to my budget, the princess will pay it,” he wrote on the margin.
It was not parsimony. It was the man’s sense of order. No one was more generous in gifts, pensions, salaries; but it irritated him to see money wasted or managed carelessly.
Through his long absence in Corsica, and the complaints which the conservatives of the island had made to the French government of the way he had handled his battalion of National Guards in a riot at Ajaccio, Napoleon lost his place in the French army. He came to Paris in the spring of 1792, hoping to regain it. But in the confused condition of public affairs little attention was given to such cases, and he was obliged to wait.
Almost penniless, he dined on six-cent dishes in cheap restaurants, pawned his watch, and with Bourrienne devised schemes for making a fortune. One was to rent some new houses going up in the city and to sub-let them. While he waited he saw the famous days of the “Second Revolution”—the 20th of June, when the mob surrounded the Tuileries, overran the palace, put the bonnet rouge on Louis XVI.’s head, did everything but strike, as the agitators had intended. Napoleon and Bourrienne, loitering on the outskirts, saw the outrages, and he said, in disgust:
“Che coglione, why did they allow these brutes to come in? They ought to have shot down five or six hundred of them with cannon, and the rest would soon have run.”
He saw the 10th of August, when the king was deposed. He was still in Paris when the horrible September massacres began—those massacres in which, to “save the country,” the fanatical and terrified populace resolved to put “rivers of blood” between Paris and the émigrés. All these excesses filled him with disgust. He began to understand that the Revolution he admired so much needed a head.
In August Napoleon was restored to the army. The following June found him with his regiment in the south of France. In the interval spent in Corsica, he had abandoned Paoli and the cause of Corsican independence. His old hero had been dragged, in spite of himself, into a movement for separating the island from France. Napoleon had taken the position that the French government, whatever its excesses, was the only advocate in Europe of liberty and equality, and that Corsica would better remain with France rather than seek English
