ions, when
one arm of the service was overmanned, the superfluous officers were
to be transferred to another. This was now the case with the
artillery, and Buonaparte, as a supernumerary, was on June thirteenth
again ordered to the west, but this time only as a mere infantry
general of brigade. He appears to have felt throughout life more
vindictiveness toward Aubry, the man whom he believed to have been
the author of this particular misfortune, than toward any other
person with whom he ever came in contact. In this rigid scrutiny of
the army list, exaggerated pretensions of service and untruthful
testimonials were no longer accepted. For this reason Joseph also had
already lost his position, and was about to settle with his family in
Genoa, while Louis was actually sent back to school, being ordered to
Chalons. Poor Lucien, overwhelmed in the general ruin of the radicals,
and with a wife and child dependent on him, was in despair. The other
members of the family were temporarily destitute, but self-helpful.

In this there was nothing new; but, for all that, the monotony of the
situation must have been disheartening. Napoleon's resolution was soon
taken. He was either really ill from privation and disappointment, or
soon became so. Armed with a medical certificate, he applied for and
received a furlough. This step having been taken, the next, according
to the unchanged and familiar instincts of the man, was to apply under
the law for mileage to pay his expenses on the journey which he had
taken as far as Paris in pursuance of the order given him on March
twenty-ninth to proceed to his post in the west. Again, following the
precedents of his life, he calculated mileage not from Marseilles,
whence he had really started, but from Nice, thus largely increasing
the amount which he asked for, and in due time received. During his
leave several projects occupied his busy brain. The most important
were a speculation in the sequestered lands of the emigrants and
monasteries, and the writing of two monographs--one a history of
events from the ninth of Fructidor, year II (August twenty-sixth,
1794), to the beginning of year IV (September twenty-third, 1795), the
other a memoir on the Army of Italy. The first notion was doubtless
due to the frenzy for speculation, more and more rife, which was now
comparable only to that which prevailed in France at the time of Law's
Mississippi scheme or in England during the South Sea Bubble. It