to send him the "Memoirs of Madame de Warens," which formed a supplement (or so he said) to the "Confessions" of Rousseau.* We believe that these memoirs were supposititious.

In the month of April, 1791, he was transferred, as first lieutenant, to the 4th Regiment of Artillery, stationed in his old quarters at Valence. His patriotic diatribe against Buttafuoco, copies of which he had distributed among the clubs, gained him some notoriety. The Jacobin clubs were now indoctrinating the army, and winning over to their cause vast numbers of soldiers and non-commissioned officers, of whom we may pretty safely say that nine of every ten expected to be colonels or generals under the "liberty and equality” system. Party spirit inevitably began to run high in the various regiments. Most of the commissioned officers were men of birth and Royalist; Bonaparte, who professed the new ideas, had frequent altercations with them, and thus obtained the reputation of being an enthusiastic Jacobin. Although in heart he was always an aristocrat, this gained him popular favour and consideration; and in brief time the Royalist officers followed the tide of emigration to the banks of the Rhine, and, by so doing, left open the field to Bonaparte, and such as he, who very soon gained the posts they had left vacant. In February, 1792, before he was twenty-three years old, Bonaparte was made a captain of artillery; so rapidly in these days of whirlwind did promotion run in favour of those who did not take the losing side. But degradation often followed promotion with equally rapid strides. The fate of the officers of the army, as that of all other classes or interests, was then in the hands of those who ruled the clubs at Paris. Thither the young captain repaired without leave granted or asked, in order to solicit active employment. Although military discipline was greatly relaxed, his absence from his corps was noticed, and he was superseded. He remained unemployed in the capital for several months,

* This letter was preserved as a great curiosity, by a bookseller at Geneva. It is many years since we saw it, but we think we can distinctly remember that it consisted only of four short lines, and that in those lines there were two errors of French orthography. We mention these trifles merely as evidence of haste and negligence. In this hurry he always wrote. His dictation was so rapid that very few could follow it.

1782.]

OUTBREAK OF THE REVOLUTION.

17

living chiefly with his Brienne schoolfellow, Bourrienne, who was about as poor and as friendless as himself. He witnessed the insurrection of the 20th of June, 1792, when the Parisian mob, for the first time, forced their way into the Tuileries. He strongly expressed to Bourrienne his indignation both at the conduct of the populace and the pusillanimity or indecision of the Court-saying that with a few pieces of cannon he could have swept away all that rabble; and when he saw the King standing near an open window with a red cap on his head, he exclaimed, “This is the way to lose a kingdom!" He was obliged to conceal the feeling for four or five years, but from this day he ever retained a loathing of the scene he had witnessed, and a strong dislike to armed mobs, and to all people in arms who were not regular soldiers. On the 10th August, 1792, he was a spectator of the second attack of the Parisian mob upon the Tuileries, which led to the bloody massacre of the faithful Swiss Guard, and to the imprisonment of Louis XVI. and his family in the tower of the Temple. He looked on with a calm calculating eye, criticising the manner in which the palace was attacked, and the way in which it was defended. All this was of use to him afterwards, when he was called upon to defend the Tuileries, as the seat of the Convention, against a similar attack. He is said to have declared at a much later period, that if he had been, at this momentous crisis, a general officer, he would have fought for the King; but, being only a poor subaltern of artillery, he took part with the Republic, which promised quick advancement, though he did not approve of its excesses. Meanwhile he was soliciting to be actively employed. From being invaded, the French had become invaders with one army, under Dumourier, they were overrunning Belgium, and with another, under Custine, they were menacing Germany; but Bonaparte could not yet be appointed to either of these forces. At last, towards the close of this stormy month of August, 1792, he received a commission to serve in the expedition of Admiral Truget, which was to scour the Mediterranean, and act more

The day after the captivity of the King he wrote to one of his uncles: "Do not be uneasy about your nephews; they will be able to find some place for themselves."

especially against Sardinia and Naples. As England had not yet been forced into the war, there was nothing at sea capable of opposing the Republicans. Bonaparte was to go to Corsica and join the expedition there. He was embarrassed at the moment by a family incident. The Assembly, which was now effacing everything that bore the royal impress, had just abolished the Royal Institution of St. Louis de St. Cyr, and the young ladies who had been placed there for education were now preparing to return home. Ill provided with money, Bonaparte hastened to St. Cyr, to look after his eldest sister, Marianne, who had been put upon the establishment through the influence of the Count de Marbœuf; and he wrote to the administrators of the district of Versailles, in which the school was situated, to ask for his sister the travelling allowance of one livre (tenpence) per league, in order that she might return to Corsica under his care.

The administrators of Versailles referred the matter to the maire and municipal council of St. Cyr, who acceded to the petition, and made out an order for 352 livres, as the travelling money of Demoiselle Marianne Bonaparte, to return to Corsica.* That very same day Napoleon removed his sister to Paris, and the following day both set out for the south. At the time of their departure the streets of Paris might literally be said to be running with blood. It was Sunday, the 2nd of September, memorable for the massacre of priests and political prisoners, who were dragged out of their dungeons and slaughtered in heaps by the mob. From the capital these horrible practices extended into the provinces, yet the brother and sister, who had contrived to pass the barriers of Paris just before they were closed preparatory to the butchery, travelled through these frightful scenes without let or hindrance. It was a time to make professions of an ardent Jacobinism, and no doubt such professions were made both by the young officer and the young lady. A suspicion of aristocracy was then death. Under the circumstances

*

Michaud, "Biographie Universelle." In this work Napoleon's letter, with a postscript written by his sister, is given at full length from the original text. The demoiselle's French orthography is quite as defective as her brother's The letter or petition is dated Septem. ber 1st, 1792.

almost any other man than Bonaparte would have waited till the end of this sanguinary crisis, but he would not delay one moment, or diverge a mile from his route.

On his arrival in Corsica, Bonaparte reported himself to Paoli, who was yet Governor, and to the military authorities, by whom he was immediately appointed to the local rank of chief of a battalion. He occupied himself in surveying the coast, especially towards the south, whence an invasion of the contiguous island of Sardinia was projected. Here the acquirements he had made in the military schools were of great practical use to him. Young as he was, he is said to have surveyed a country, for military purposes, better than any other officer. In January, 1793, Admiral Truget appeared with his fleet and some land troops before Cagliari, the little Sardinian capital; and about the same time Bonaparte was employed with a

body of soldiers and sailors in making a diversion from Bonifacio, by attacking the islets in the narrow strait which divides Corsica from Sardinia. He anchored off the island of La Madalena, he took possession of the little island of Santa Stefano, but failed completely in the attack of the larger island, with the loss both of artillery and men. This small and unfortunate affair was the first engagement of Napoleon Bonaparte. According to local tradition, he had never been under fire before, and he directed his own guns and the throwing of the bombs with rare skill. The Sards of La Madalena kept for many years a bomb which fell upon one of their churches, and which they said had been thrown by Bonaparte's own hand. In the same church they preserved some silver chandeliers and a silver crucifix, which had been presented to them by our great Nelson, who, in 1794, made Corsica the scene of some of his most brilliant and romantic exploits.* It has been reasonably conjectured that this failure was owing quite as much to the indiscipline of his own people as to the resistance he experienced from the islanders. On the eve of the expedition to La Madalena, it is said that he ran a narrow chance of being torn to pieces by the French sailors, who were all demagogues, and were committing bloody excesses at Ajaccio. These Jacobin sailors got into a quarrel with some Corsican soldiers (or so goes the local story); Bonaparte, as an officer, ran to restore order; the seamen called him an aristocrat, sang ça ira to him, fell upon him, and were about proceeding to extremities, when the mayor, municipals, and inhabitants of the town of Bonifacio ran to the rescue, and saved him.

Truget likewise failed completely in his attack upon Cagliari, for the native population would not fraternize, and the King of Sardinia's artillery, firing red-hot shot, burned one of his ships, sank two others, and damaged all the rest. A few weeks after this catastrophe Corsica itself took up arms against France. De Paoli, indignant at the de

* Valery, "Voyages en Corse, a l'Ile d'Elbe et en Sardaigne." Nelson's silver chande liers and crucifix remain, and are much prized; but in 1832 the islanders sold the reputed Bonaparte bomb to a Glasgow merchant for thirty dollars, which money was to be spent in buying a clock for the church.