Mr. Bonaparte of Corsica | Page 7

you are going away on that you are going
on it."
Here Joseph smiled weakly, but Napoleon was grim as ever.
"Well," he said, impatiently, "what of that?"
"Why," returned Joseph, "it seemed to me that such a tireless little
worker as the boat is would find it very restful to take a Nap."
For an instant Napoleon was silent.
"Joseph," said he, as he gazed solemnly out of the window, "I thank
you from the bottom of my heart for this. I had had regrets at leaving
home. A moment ago I was ready to break down for the sorrow of
parting from my favorite Alp, from my home, from my mother, and my
little brass cannon; but now--now I can go with a heart steeled against
emotion. If you are going in for humor of that kind, I'm glad I'm going
away. Farewell."
With this, picking Joseph up in his arms and concealing him beneath
the sofa cushions, Napoleon imprinted a kiss upon his mother's cheek,
rushed aboard the craft that was to bear him to fame, and was soon but
a memory in the little house at Ajaccio. "Parting is such sweet sorrow,"
murmured Joseph, as he watched the little vessel bounding over the
turquoise waters of the imprisoned sea. "I shall miss him; but there are
those who wax fat on grief, and, if I know myself, I am of that brand."
Arrived at Paris, Napoleon was naturally awe-stricken by the splendors
of that wonderful city.
"I shall never forget the first sight I had of Paris," he said, years later,
when speaking of his boyhood to Madame Junot, with whom he was
enjoying a tete-a-tete in the palace at Versailles. "I wondered if I hadn't
died of sea-sickness on the way over, as I had several times wished I
might, and got to heaven. I didn't know how like the other place it was
at that time, you see. It was like an enchanted land, a World's Fair
forever, and the prices I had to pay for things quite carried out the

World's Fair idea. They were enormous. Weary with walking, for
instance, I hired a fiacre and drove about the city for an hour, and it
cost me fifty francs; but I fell in with pleasant enough people, one of
whom gave me a ten-franc ticket entitling me to a seat on a park
bench--for five francs."
Madame Junot laughed.
"And yet they claim that bunco is a purely American institution," she
said.
"Dame!" cried Napoleon, rising from the throne, and walking excitedly
up and down the palace floor, "I never realized until this moment that I
had been swindled! Bourrienne, send Fouche to me. I remember the
man distinctly, and if he lives he has yet to die."
Calming down, he walked to Madame Junot's side, and, taking her by
the hand, continued:
"And then the theatres! What revelations of delight they were! I used to
go to the Theatre Francais whenever I could sneak away and had the
money to seat me with the gods in the galleries. Bernhardt was then
playing juvenile parts, and Coquelin had not been heard of. Ah! my
dear Madame Junot," he added, giving her ear a delicate pinch, "those
were the days when life seemed worth the living--when one of a
taciturn nature and prone to irritability could find real pleasure in
existence. Oh to be unknown again!"
And then, Madame Junot's husband having entered the room, the
Emperor once more relapsed into a moody silence.
But to return to Brienne. Napoleon soon found that there is a gulf
measurable by no calculable distance between existence as the
dominating force of a family and life as a new boy at a boarding-
school. He found his position reversed, and he began for the first time
in his life to appreciate the virtues of his brother Joseph. He who had
been the victorious general crossing the Alps now found himself the
Alp, with a dozen victorious generals crossing him; he who had been
the gunner was now the target, and his present inability to express his
feelings in language which his tormentors could understand, for he had
not yet mastered the French tongue, kept him in a state of being which
may well be termed volcanic.
"I simply raged within in those days," Napoleon once said to Las Casas.
"I could have swallowed my food raw and it would have been cooked

on its way down, I boiled so. They took me for a snow-clad Alp, when,
as a matter of fact, I was a small Vesuvius, with a temperature that
would have made Tabasco sauce seem like iced water by contrast."
His treatment at the hands of his fellow-students did much to increase
his irritability, but he kept