of a cultured lady who had befriended him in his solitude, he
saw his first love, Caroline de Colombier. It was a passing fancy;
but to her all the passion of his southern nature welled forth. She
seems to have returned his love; for in the stormy sunset of his life
at St. Helena he recalled some delicious walks at dawn when Caroline
and he had--eaten cherries together. One lingers fondly over these
scenes of his otherwise stern career, for they reveal his capacity for
social joys and for deep and tender affection, had his lot been
otherwise cast. How different might have been his life, had France
never conquered Corsica, and had the Revolution never burst forth! But
Corsica was still his dominant passion. When he was called away from
Valence to repress a riot at Lyons, his feelings, distracted for a
time by Caroline, swerved back towards his island home; and in
September, 1786, he had the joy of revisiting the scenes of his
childhood. Warmly though he greeted his mother, brothers and sisters,
after an absence of nearly eight years, his chief delight was in the
rocky shores, the verdant dales and mountain heights of Corsica. The
odour of the forests, the setting of the sun in the sea "as in the
bosom of the infinite," the quiet proud independence of the
mountaineers themselves, all enchanted him. His delight reveals almost
Wertherian powers of "sensibility." Even the family troubles could not
damp his ardour. His father had embarked on questionable speculations,
which now threatened the Buonapartes with bankruptcy, unless the
French Government proved to be complacent and generous. With the hope
of pressing one of the family claims on the royal exchequer, the
second son procured an extension of furlough and sped to Paris. There
at the close of 1787 he spent several weeks, hopefully endeavouring to
extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of
disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself
the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about
the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid
life of Corsica was that turbid frothy existence--already swirling
towards its mighty plunge!

After a furlough of twenty-one months he rejoined his regiment, now at
Auxonne. There his health suffered considerably, not only from the
miasma of the marshes of the river Saone, but also from family
anxieties and arduous literary toils. To these last it is now needfu