ad always had in it at least one French
representative. Between the latest of these, Lacombe Saint-Michel, now
a member of the Committee of Safety, and the Salicetti party no love
was ever lost. It was a general feeling that the refugee Corsicans on
the Mediterranean shore were too near their home. They were always
charged with unscrupulous planning to fill their own pockets. Now,
somehow or other, inexplicably perhaps, but nevertheless certainly, a
costly expedition had been sent to Corsica under the impulse of these
very men, and it had failed. The unlucky adventurers had scarcely set
their feet on shore before Lacombe secured Buonaparte's appointment to
the Army of the West, where he would be far from old influences, with
orders to proceed immediately to his post. The papers reached
Marseilles, whither the Buonapartes had already betaken themselves,
during the month of April. On May second,[48] accompanied by Louis,
Junot, and Marmont, the broken general set out for Paris, where he
arrived with his companions eight days later, and rented shabby
lodgings in the Fosses-Montmartre, now Aboukir street. The style of
the house was Liberty Hotel.

[Footnote 48: Possibly the twelfth. See Jung, III, I.]

At this point Buonaparte's apprentice years may be said to have ended:
he was virtually the man he remained to the end. A Corsican by origin,
he retained the national sensibility and an enormous power of
endurance both physical and intellectual, together with the dogged
persistence found in the medieval Corsicans. He was devoted with
primitive virtue to his family and his people, but was willing to
sacrifice the latter, at least, to his ambition. His moral sense,
having never been developed by education, and, worse than that, having
been befogged by the extreme sensibility of Rousseau and by the chaos
of the times which that prophet had brought to pass, was practically
lacking. Neither the hostility of his father to religion, nor his own
experiences with the Jesuits, could, however, entirely eradicate a
superstition which passed in his mind for faith. Sometimes he was a
scoffer, as many with weak convictions are; but in general he
preserved a formal and outward respect for the Church. He was,
however, a stanch opponent of Roman centralization and papal
pretensions. His theoretical education had been narrow and one-sided;
but his reading and his authorship, in spite of their superficial and
desultory character,