LITMIR.BIZ

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of Finance for payment of promised subsidies for draining the salt-marshes near Ajaccio.

      Carlo had yet another worry. Joseph, now aged sixteen and having scooped all the prizes at Autun, announced that he did not wish to enter Aix seminary. Evidently he felt no call to the priesthood. Lack of such a call did not deter many in this free-thinking age from taking orders, and it speaks well for the Buonaparte upbringing that Joseph should have acted as he did. Joseph and Napoleon wrote to each other, and perhaps it was the younger boy’s Cornelian descriptions of military life which made Joseph announce that he too wanted to become an officer.

      Napoleon received this news from his father in June. In Corsica the eldest son enjoyed exceptional respect; his decisions were normally beyond criticism by juniors. Napoleon, however, felt no inhibitions here; his sense of responsibility came to the fore and he wrote to his uncle, Nicolò Paravicini, one of the few letters preserved from his schooldays. It is in French and begins:

      My dear uncle,

      I am writing to let you know that my dear father came to Brienne on his way to Paris to take Marie Anne to Saint-Cyr, and to try to recover his health … He left Lucciano here, nine years old, three foot eleven and a half inches tall … He is in good health, chubby, lively and scatterbrained, and he has made a good first impression.

      Napoleon then turns to Joseph who, he says, now wishes to serve the King. ‘In this he is quite wrong for several reasons. He has been educated for the Church. It is late to go back on his word. My Lord Bishop of Autun would have given him an important living and he was sure of becoming Bishop. What advantage for the family! My Lord of Autun has done everything possible to make him persevere, and promised that he would not regret it. No good. He’s made up his mind.’ Having said as much, Napoleon then feels he may be doing Joseph an injustice. ‘If he has a real taste for this kind of life, the finest of all careers, then I praise him: if the great mover of human affairs has given him – like me – a definite inclination for military service.’ In the margin, reflecting perhaps on his father’s drawn, ill-looking face and on an officer’s slender pay, Napoleon adds that he hopes all the same Joseph will follow the Church career for which his talents suit him and be ‘the support of our family’.

      The letter is interesting because it shows Napoleon taking the lead yet trying to see both sides of the problem. His doubts about Joseph’s military aptitude were eventually to be proved correct; for the present an unexpected event was soon to take Joseph back to Corsica.

      In October 1784 the fifteen-year-old Napoleon prepared to leave Brienne. Unlike Joseph, he had won no prizes. But every year he had done well enough to be chosen to recite or answer questions on the platform at Speech Day. His best subject was mathematics, his second best geography. His weakest point was spelling. He wrote French by ear – la vaillance became, in one of his letters home, l’avallance – and all his life was to spell even simple words incorrectly.

      On 17 October, his hair in a pigtail, powdered and tied with a ribbon, Napoleon boarded the mail coach at Brienne with Father Berton. At Nogent they transferred to the inexpensive passenger barge, drawn by four horses, which took them slowly down the Seine. On the afternoon of the 21st they arrived in Paris.

      Here Napoleon felt very much the provincial; he was seen ‘gaping in all directions with just the expression to attract a pick-pocket’. And well he might, for Paris was a city of great wealth and also of great poverty. Noblemen’s carriages raced through narrow streets preceded by mastiffs to clear the rabble; their wheels sent the thick mud flying. There were smart shops selling osprey feathers and gloves scented with jasmine, but also many beggars thankful for a sou. One new feature was the street-lamps, suspended on ropes, which at dusk were lowered, lit and raised again: they were called lanternes.

      The first thing Napoleon did in Paris was to buy a book. His choice fell on Gil Blas, a novel about a penniless Spanish boy who rises to become secretary to the Prime Minister. Father Berton took him to the church of Saint-Germain to say a prayer for their safe arrival, and then to the Ecole Militaire, Gabriel’s splendid building, its façade dominated by eight Corinthian columns, a dome and a clock framed with garlands. It had been open only thirteen years and was one of the sights of Paris.

      Napoleon found everything very lavish. The classrooms were papered in blue with gold fleurs-de-lys; there were curtains at the windows and doors. His dormitory was heated by a faïence stove, his jug and wash-basin were of pewter, his bed hung with curtains of Alençon linen. He had a more elaborate blue uniform, with a red collar and silver braid, and he wore white gloves. The meals were delicious, and at dinner three desserts were served. The masters were picked men, highly paid. The cost to France of a subsidized cadet like Napoleon was 4,282 livres a year.

      Life was much more like real army life. It pleased Napoleon that lights-out and reveille were signalled by the beating of drums, and the atmosphere was that of ‘a garrison town’. In winter the 150 cadets, graduates from the twelve provincial academies, took part in attacking and defending Fort Timbrune, a reduced but exact facsimile of a fortified town. Napoleon, because of his wish to join the navy, was placed in the artillery class, where he studied hydrostatics, and differential and integral calculus.

      One day Napoleon was on the parade ground, drilling with his long unwieldy musket. He made a mistake, whereupon the senior cadet, who was instructing him, gave him a sharp rap over the knuckles. This was contrary to regulations. In a fury Napoleon threw his musket at the senior cadet’s head – never again, he swore, would he receive lessons from him. His superiors, seeing that they would have to handle this new cadet carefully, gave him another instructor, Alexandre des Mazis. Napoleon and Alexandre, who was one year ahead of him, at once struck up a lasting friendship.

      The effeminate Laugier de Bellecour, once in Paris, definitely threw in his lot with the ‘queers’, indeed at one point the school authorities were so disgusted that they decided to send him back to Brienne, but were overruled by the Minister. When Laugier tried to renew relations Napoleon replied, ‘Monsieur, you have scorned my advice, and so you have renounced my friendship. Never speak to me again.’ Laugier was furious. Later he came on Napoleon from behind and pushed him down. Napoleon got up, ran after him, caught him by the collar and threw him to the floor. In falling Laugier hit his head against a stove, and the captain on duty rushed up to administer punishment. ‘I was insulted,’ Napoleon explained, ‘and I took my revenge. There’s nothing more to be said.’ And he calmly walked off.

      Napoleon was evidently upset by Laugier’s relapse, which he linked with the luxury of his new surroundings. He sat down and wrote the Minister of War a ‘memorandum on the education of Spartan youth’, whose example he suggested should be followed in French academies. He sent a draft to Father Berton, but was advised by him to drop the whole affair, so his curious essay never reached its destination. This small episode is, however, important in two ways. As he later told a friend, Napoleon quite often felt physical attraction for men; it was because he had personal experience of homosexual urges that he was so eager to see them damped down. The other aspect of his essay is that it shows Napoleon for the first time sensing a national malaise. The malaise was real, but only a few, chiefly artists, sensed it. 1785, the year Napoleon wrote, was the year of the Diamond Necklace scandal, and the year when Louis David, reacting against the malaise, painted Le Serment des Horaces, in which after sixty years of lolling on beds and swings and scented cushions, the figures in French art suddenly snap to attention.

      Napoleon spent his leisure moments, says Alexandre des Mazis, striding through the school, arms folded, head lowered – a posture for which he was criticized on parade. He thought often of his unsophisticated homeland and of exiled Paoli, who had modelled the Corsican constitution on Sparta’s. One of his friends made a funny drawing of Napoleon walking with long steps, a little Paoli hanging on to the knot at the back of his hair, with the caption, ‘Bonaparte, run, fly, to the help of Paoli and rescue him from his enemies.’

      In the month after Napoleon entered the Ecole Militaire, his father came to the south of France to seek medical advice. He suffered from almost continual pain in the stomach, and a diet of pears prescribed in Paris by no less a man than Marie Antoinette’s physician had brought him no relief. At Aix he consulted Professor Turnatori, then went on to Montpellier,

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