au for all
who were discontented with their surroundings. He seemed infallibly
to demonstrate the absurdity of tyranny and the need of returning to
the primitive bliss of the social contract. It mattered not that the
said contract was utterly unhistorical and that his argument teemed
with fallacies. He inspired a whole generation with detestation of the
present and with longings for the golden age. Poets had sung of it,
but Rousseau seemed to bring it within the grasp of long-suffering
mortals.

The first extant manuscript of Napoleon, written at Valence in April,
1786, shows that he sought in Rousseau's armoury the logical weapons
for demonstrating the "right" of the Corsicans to rebel against the
French. The young hero-worshipper begins by noting that it is the
birthday of Paoli. He plunges into a panegyric on the Corsican
patriots, when he is arrested by the thought that many censure them
for rebelling at all. "The divine laws forbid revolt. But what have
divine laws to do with a purely human affair? Just think of the
absurdity--divine laws universally forbidding the casting off of a
usurping yoke! ... As for human laws, there cannot be any after the
prince violates them." He then postulates two origins for government
as alone possible. Either the people has established laws and
submitted itself to the prince, or the prince has established laws. In
the first case, the prince is engaged by the very nature of his office
to execute the covenants. In the second case, the laws tend, or do not
tend, to the welfare of the people, which is the aim of all
government: if they do not, the contract with the prince dissolves of
itself, for the people then enters again into its primitive state.
Having thus proved the sovereignty of the people, Buonaparte uses his
doctrine to justify Corsican revolt against France, and thus concludes
his curious medley: "The Corsicans, following all the laws of justice,
have been able to shake off the yoke of the Genoese, and may do the
same with that of the French. Amen."

Five days later he again gives the reins to his melancholy. "Always
alone, though in the midst of men," he faces the thought of suicide.
With an innate power of summarizing and balancing thoughts and
sensations, he draws up arguments for and against this act. He is in
the dawn of his days and in four months' time he will see "la patrie,"
which he has not seen since childhood. What joy! And yet--how men have
fallen away from n