demanded an order from both the city and
department officials. It was by the kind intervention of the mayor
that the red tape was cut; the money was paid on the next day, and
that night the brother and the sister lodged in the Holland Patriots'
Hotel in Paris, where they appear to have remained for a week.

This is the statement of an early biographer, and appears to be borne
out by an autograph letter of Napoleon's, recently found, in which he
says he left Paris on a date which, although the figure is blurred,
seems to be the ninth.[30] Some days would be necessary for the new
captain to procure a further leave of absence. Judging from subsequent
events, it is possible that he was also seeking further acquaintance
and favor with the influential Jacobins of Paris. During the days from
the second to the seventh more than a thousand of the royalists
confined in the prisons of Paris were massacred. It seems incredible
that a man of Napoleon's temperament should have seen and known
nothing of the riotous events connected with such bloodshed. Yet
nowhere does he hint that he had any personal knowledge. It is
possible that he left earlier than is generally supposed, but it is
not likely in view of the known dates of his journey. In any case he
did not seriously compromise himself, doing at the most nothing
further than to make plans for the future. It may have become clear to
him, for it was true and he behaved accordingly, that France was not
yet ready for him, nor he for France.

[Footnote 30: Napoleon inconnu, II, 408.]

It is, moreover, a strong indication of Buonaparte's interest in the
French Revolution being purely tentative that as soon as the desired
leave was granted, probably in the second week of September, without
waiting for the all-important fifteen hundred livres of arrears, now
due him, but not paid until a month later, he and his sister set out
for home. They traveled by diligence to Lyons, and thence by the
Rhone to Marseilles. During the few hours' halt of the boat at
Valence, Napoleon's friends, among them some of his creditors, who
apparently bore him no grudge, waited on him with kindly
manifestations of interest. His former landlady, Mme. Bou, although
her bill had been but insignificantly diminished by payments on
account, brought as her gift a basket of the fruit in which the
neighborhood abounds at that season. The regiment was no longer there,
the greater portion, with the colonel