of the holy man for whom it was named. The irreverent
school-boys of Autun and Brienne gave the nickname "straw
nose"--_paille-au-nez_--to both the brothers. The pronunciation,
therefore, was probably as uncertain as the form, Napaille-au-nez
being probably a distortion of Napouillone. The chameleon-like
character of the name corresponds exactly to the chameleon-like
character of the times, the man, and the lands of his birth and of his
adoption. The Corsican noble and French royalist was Napoleone de
Buonaparte; the Corsican republican and patriot was Napoleone
Buonaparte; the French republican, Napoleon Buonaparte; the victorious
general, Bonaparte; the emperor, Napoleon. There was likewise a change
in this person's handwriting analogous to the change in his
nationality and opinions. It was probably to conceal a most defective
knowledge of French that the adoptive Frenchman, as republican,
consul, and emperor, abandoned the fairly legible hand of his youth,
and recurred to the atrocious one of his childhood, continuing always
to use it after his definite choice of a country.

Stormy indeed were his nation and his birthtime. He himself said: "I
was born while my country was dying. Thirty thousand French, vomited
on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood--such
was the horrid sight which first met my view. The cries of the dying,
the groans of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle at
my birth."

These were the words he used in 1789, while still a Corsican in
feeling, when addressing Paoli. They strain chronology for the sake of
rhetorical effect, but they truthfully picture the circumstances under
which he was conceived. Among many others of a similar character there
is a late myth which recalls in detail that when the pains of
parturition seized his mother she was at mass, and that she reached
her chamber just in time to deposit, on a carpet or a piece of
embroidery representing the young Achilles, the prodigy bursting so
impetuously into the world. By the man himself his nature was always
represented as the product of his hour, and this he considered a
sufficient excuse for any line of conduct he chose to follow. When in
banishment at Longwood, and on his death-bed, he recalled the
circumstances of his childhood in conversations with the attendant
physician, a Corsican like himself. "Nothing awed me; I feared no one.
I struck one, I scratched another, I was a terror to everybody