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arms were free to return to their homes.

      Carlo had accepted the offer and had taken Letizia and Giuseppe back to Ajaccio where, by the time Napoleone was born, the Corsican flag had been replaced by France’s fleurs de lys on a blue ground.

      Puny as Napoleone had seemed at first – born so suddenly before his time – and worried as his mother had been that he might die, as two of her babies had already done, he soon grew stronger, being fed at his mother’s breast as well as by a wet-nurse, a sailor’s wife named Camilla Ilari.

      In contrast with his quiet, retiring elder brother, Giuseppe, Napoleone grew into a rather rumbustious boy, often provoking Giuseppe into rowdy wrestling matches on the floor until their mother took all the furniture out of one of the rooms and left the children there to be as noisy and rough as Napoleone liked. She was not, however, an over-indulgent mother, insisting on daily baths, regular attendance at Mass, and often giving them a sharp buffet when they were tiresome or naughty. Napoleon himself, so he later confessed, was particularly unruly and stubborn as a child. ‘I would hit Giuseppe,’ he said, ‘and then force him to do my homework. If I was punished and given only plain bread to eat I would swap it for the shepherd’s chestnut bread, or I would go to find my nurse who would give me some little squids I quite liked.’

      He recalled one particularly severe beating:

      My grandmother was quite old and stooped [he was to tell his natural son, Alexandre Walewski], and she seemed to me and my sister, Pauline [born in 1780], like an old fairy godmother. She walked with a cane; and, although she was fond of us and gave us sweets, that did not stop us walking behind her and imitating her. Unfortunately she caught us doing this and told our mother who, while loving us, would stand no nonsense. Pauline was punished first because skirts are easier to pull up and down than trousers are to unbutton. That evening she tried to catch me also but I escaped. The next morning she pushed me away when I tried to kiss her. Later that day she said, ‘Napoleone, you are invited to lunch at the Governor’s house. Go and get changed.’ I went upstairs and began to get undressed. But my mother was like a cat waiting for a mouse. She suddenly entered the room. I realized, too late, that I had fallen into her trap and I had to submit to her beating.

      His mother was, Napoleon said of her, ‘both strict and tender’; and he readily acknowledged the influence she had over the development of his character. ‘I was very well brought up by my mother,’ he was to say. ‘I owe her a great deal. She instilled pride.’ The children’s father sometimes worried that his wife was too strict with them; but she insisted that bringing up the children was her business, not his. She was masterful in her way.

      All in all, Napoleone’s was a happy childhood, and a very familial one. The big, dark house was large but fully occupied behind its shuttered windows. Napoleone, his parents and siblings lived on the first floor. The ground floor was occupied by Letizia’s mother-in-law and an uncle, Luciano, Archdeacon of Ajaccio, who was often incapacitated by gout; while, on the second floor, lived various cousins who were, on occasions, a quarrelsome lot of whom Carlo would have been pleased to be rid had he felt able to turn them out. Relations between the two families went from bad to worse after a tub of slops was thrown out of a second-floor window on to one of Letizia’s dresses hanging out to dry below. Although Letizia saw to it that they did not live extravagantly, the Buonapartes did live quite well. Carlo had inherited two good vineyards and both pasture and arable land from his father, while Letizia had brought to the marriage over thirty acres, a mill and a large oven in which bread was baked from corn ground in the family mill. Milk and cheese came from the family’s goats, oil from their olives, tunny from the fishermen trawling the Golfe d’Ajaccio. Uncle Luciano was proud to say that the Buonapartes had ‘never paid for bread, wine or oil’. Napoleone, however, was not much interested in food – except for cherries, which he consumed with relish. Otherwise, he ate what was put before him without enthusiasm or comment.

      When he was five years old, he was sent to a kindergarten kept by nuns at which he would arrive, despite his mother’s care, with his clothes awry and his stockings crumpled round his ankles, holding hands with a little girl named Giacominetta. This gave rise to a verse with which the other children would taunt him, deriding him for the stockings that fell down to his ankles and for his love for Giacominetta:

       Napoleone di mezza calzettaFa l’amore a Giacominetta

      Provoked by this, he would throw stones at his tormentors or charge at them with fists flailing.

      From the kindergarten he was sent to a school for boys where he learned to read and write both French and Italian and was given lessons in arithmetic which he enjoyed and at which he excelled. In the hot summers of the holidays, his parents took their children to one or other of their farmhouses up in the hills or to a house near the sea, their mother putting them on horseback as soon as they could walk. Napoleone would be taken for rides by his aunt, Galtruda, who told him what she knew about horticulture and agriculture, showed him how to prune a vine, and pointed out to him the damage done to the olive trees by his uncle Luciano’s goats. He received a different kind of instruction from his mother, who sent Giuseppe and Napoleone to bed without supper from time to time so that they should ‘bear discomfort without protest’. She also told them that although they came of noble stock, they would have to make sacrifices in order to appear before the world as a nobleman was expected to do.

      ‘When you grow up, you’ll be poor,’ she said to Napoleone one day. ‘But it’s better, even if you have to live on dry bread, to have a fine room for receiving guests, a fine suit of clothes and a fine horse.’ She urged her children to be proud of their ancestry; and while Napoleon was always to bridle when his enemies referred to him derogatorily as ‘the Corsican’, he was not ashamed of his origins and never attempted to conceal them, though he did once say, ‘I’m not a Corsican. I was brought up in France, therefore I am French.’

      His mother also persuaded him to believe in destiny and the power of providence and of spirits from another world. Whenever she heard surprising, unexpected news, she would suddenly cross herself and murmur under her breath, ‘Gesu!’

      Prospering as a lawyer under French rule and appointed to a seat in the Corsican States-General and to membership of the Council of Twelve Nobles, Carlo was now able to afford a nurse for the children and two maids for his wife. She felt in need of the help: another son, Luciano (Lucien, as he was to be known in France), was born when Napoleone was six years old, and, two years after this, a daughter, Maria Anna, later known as Elisa. Then there was a fourth son, Luigi (Louis), two more daughters, Maria Paula (Pauline) and Maria Annunziata (Caroline) and, lastly, a fifth son, Girolamo (Jérôme), born in 1784.

      Repeated pregnancies had not spoiled their mother’s good looks which were much admired by the French Governor of Corsica, Charles René, comte de Marbeuf, whose elderly wife had not accompanied him to the island and whose French mistress had returned home. He was said to be much in love with Letizia; but she, deeply religious and mindful of her duty to her husband, seems to have been content to enjoy his admiration without encouraging it, although there were those who believed they were lovers and that Luigi was his child.

      Both she and her husband eagerly accepted his offer when the comte undertook not only to find places for Giuseppe and Napoleone at educational establishments in France but also, having no children of his own, to pay the necessary fees. So the brothers were sent to a good school at Autun and from there, so it was planned, Giuseppe should go to the seminary at Aix with a view to entering the church, while Napoleone should train for a career in the army at the military academy at Brienne-le-Château.

      When this decision about his future was made, Napoleone was not yet nine years old; and Camilla, his former wet-nurse and still a family friend, wept to see him leave home so early. His mother displayed no such emotion. In accordance with Corsican custom, she took him and his brother Giuseppe to the Lazarists, a congregation of secular priests living under religious vows, to be blessed by the Father Superior, and then accompanied them across the high ground through Corte to the coast at Bastia to see them off on a ship bound for Marseilles. At the quayside, Napoleone seemed apprehensive: his mother bent down to kiss him and to whisper in his ear, ‘Coraggio.’ It was to be many months before she saw the boy again.

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