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This offer was like an answer to prayer. Abandoned now were the vague schemes for making lawyers of the two older boys. It must be either soldiering or the priesthood. Carlo and Letizia decided that Giuseppe, quiet and good-natured, had the makings of a priest. Not so Napoleone, who had to be slapped to High Mass. Strong and mettlesome, he was more likely to have the Ramolino gift for soldiering. So they decided that Napoleone should try for military academy.
Marbeuf supported Carlo’s requests and sent the documents to Paris, with testimonies that Carlo could not afford the school fees. In 1778 the royal decisions arrived. Giuseppe could go to Aix, but only when he was sixteen. Until then he must clearly have some French schooling, and this Carlo could not afford. Again Marbeuf stepped in. His nephew was Bishop of Autun, and the college at Autun was an excellent school, the French Eton. Giuseppe could go there until he was old enough for Aix, and Marbeuf, who had no children of his own, would look after his fees. As for Napoleone, he was accepted in principle for the military academy at Brienne, though final confirmation had to await a new certificate of nobility, this time from the royal heraldist in Versailles. Court officials were notoriously slow, and the certificate might take months: perhaps it would be a good plan if Napoleone spent those months with his brother at Autun, again at Marbeuf’s expense. Carlo and Letizia gladly agreed.
Carlo was able to show his gratitude in one small way. Already guerrilla leader, lawyer, farmer and politician, he now turned poet, perhaps under the influence of his new library. When Marbeuf, on the death of his first wife, married a young lady called Mademoiselle de Fenoyl – without, however, growing any the less enamoured of Letizia – Carlo wrote and gave him a sonnet in Italian, which he proudly copied into his account book, beside the homely lists of farms, linen, clothes and kitchen utensils. It is quite a good sonnet, reflecting Carlo’s own love of children and hopes for his own sons. May Marbeuf and his wife, he says, soon be blessed with a son, who will bring tears of joy to their eyes, and, following his ancestors’ exalted career, shed lustre on the fleur-de-lys, and on his parents’ honour.
Napoleone aged nine had every reason to be pleased with life. He lived in a fine house in the prettiest town of a strikingly beautiful island. He was proud that his family had fought with Paoli, but too young to feel resentment against French troops or French officials, who in fact were pouring money into Corsica on modernization schemes. He had brothers and a sister, and, though not the eldest, he could get the better of Giuseppe if it came to a fight. He admired his father, who had risen in the world, and loved his mother who, as he put it, was ‘both tender and strict’. He doubtless disliked the idea of leaving home, but it was, everyone said, a great opportunity and he intended to make the most of it. When he went to school his mother would give him a piece of white bread for his lunch. On the way he exchanged it with one of the garrison soldiers for coarse brown bread. When Letizia scolded him, he replied that since he was going to be a soldier he must get used to soldier’s rations, and anyway he preferred brown bread to white.
Napoleone watched his mother, already busy with her baby daughter, as she prepared and marked the vast number of shirts and collars and towels prescribed by boarding-schools. In addition, Napoleone had to have a silver fork and spoon, and a goblet inscribed with the Buonaparte arms: a red shield crossed diagonally by three silver bands, and two six-pointed azure stars, the whole surmounted by a coronet.
On the evening of 11 December 1778 Letizia, following a Corsican custom, took Giuseppe and Napoleone to the Lazarists to be blessed by the Father Superior. Next day the boys said goodbye to their brothers and sister, to the gout-ridden Archdeacon, to the many aunts and countless cousins who composed a Corsican family, and to Camilla: tears ran down her cheeks to see ‘her Napoleone’ leave. Then they set out on horseback across the mountains, with mules for their luggage, as far as Corte, where Marbeuf had arranged for a carriage to take them on to Bastia. Also of the party was Letizia’s half-brother, Giuseppe Fesch, who, again with Marbeuf’s assistance, was entering Aix seminary: a pleasant fat pink lad of sixteen. In the south of the island there was always a cousin or uncle to stay with, but not so at Bastia, and they had to spend the night in a simple inn. An old man dragged mattresses into a chilly room but there were too few to go round, so the five of them huddled together and snatched what sleep they could. Next morning Napoleone boarded the ship for France, a boy of nine and a half leaving home for the first time. As his mother kissed him goodbye she sensed what he was feeling and spoke a last word in his ear: ‘Courage!’
* Throughout the period covered by this book, save the inflationary years 1791–9, the purchasing power of the livre or franc was slightly in excess of £1 today.
ON Christmas Day 1778 at Marseille Napoleone Buonaparte set foot on French soil, and found himself among people whose language he could not understand. Happily his father was there, practical and speaking French, to organize the journey to Aix, where Giuseppe Fesch was dropped off, and then north, probably by boat, the cheapest way, up the rivers Rhône and Saône to the heart of this land eighty times the size of Corsica. At Villefranche, a town of 10,000 inhabitants in the wine-growing Beaujolais, Carlo said, ‘How silly we are to be vain about our country: we boast of the main street in Ajaccio and here, in an ordinary French town, there’s a street just as wide and just as handsome.’
Corsica is mountainous, rugged and poor; to the Buonapartes France must have seemed its complete opposite, with soft rolling contours, trim fields and well-pruned vineyards, straight roads, big houses with park and lake and swans. A population of twenty-five million, by far the largest in Europe, enjoyed a high standard of living and exported almost twice as much as they imported. French furniture, tapestries, gold and silver plate, jewellery and porcelain graced houses from the Tagus to the Volga. Ladies in Stockholm, like ladies in Naples, wore Parisian dresses and gloves, and carried Paris-made fans, while their husbands took snuff from French snuff-boxes, laid out their gardens French style, and considered themselves uneducated if they had not read Montesquieu, Rousseau and Voltaire. In coming to France the two Buonaparte boys had entered the centre of European civilization.
Autun was a slightly smaller town than Villefranche, but richer in fine buildings. There was more beautiful carving over one doorway of its Romanesque cathedral than in all Corsica. Carlo presented his sons to Bishop de Marbeuf and put them in charge of the head-master of Autun College. On the first day of 1779 he said goodbye to Joseph and Napoleon, as they were now being called, and set out for Paris to secure the certificate of Napoleon’s noble birth.
Napoleon’s first task was to learn French, which was also the language of educated Europe, the great universal language that Latin had once been. He found it difficult. He was not good at memorizing and reproducing sounds, nor did he have the flexible temperament of the born linguist. In his four months at Autun he learned to speak French, but retained a strong Italian accent, and pronounced certain words Italian style, for example ‘tou’ instead of ‘tu’, ‘classé’ instead of ‘classe’. At Autun in fact he was still very much the Corsican. This led one of his masters, Father Chardon, to speak of the French conquest. ‘Why were you beaten? You had Paoli, and Paoli was meant to be a good general.’ ‘He is, sir,’ replied Napoleon, ‘and I want to grow up like him.’
The royal heraldist issued Napoleon’s certificate and the time came for the two brothers to part. Joseph cried profusely but only one tear ran down Napoleon’s cheek, and this he tried to hide. Afterwards, the assistant head-master, who had been watching, said to Joseph, ‘He didn’t show it, but he’s just as sad as you.’
In the second half of May Napoleon was taken by Bishop de Marbeuf’s vicar to the little town of Brienne, lying in the green