menaced the regular troops in
the citadel. The conflict was finally stopped by commissioners sent by
Paoli; and the volunteers were sent away from the town.

Buonaparte's position now seemed desperate. His conduct exposed him to
the hatred of most of his fellow-citizens and to the rebukes of the
French War Department. In fact, he had doubly sinned: he had actually
exceeded his furlough by four months: he was technically guilty, first
of desertion, and secondly of treason. In ordinary times he would have
been shot, but the times were extraordinary, and he rightly judged
that when a Continental war was brewing, the most daring course was
also the most prudent, namely, to go to Paris. Thither Paoli allowed
him to proceed, doubtless on the principle of giving the young madcap
a rope wherewith to hang himself.

On his arrival at Marseilles, he hears that war has been declared by
France against Austria; for the republican Ministry, which Louis XVI.
had recently been compelled to accept, believed that war against an
absolute monarch would intensify revolutionary fervour in France and
hasten the advent of the Republic. Their surmises were correct.
Buonaparte, on his arrival at Paris, witnessed the closing scenes of
the reign of Louis XVI. On June 20th he saw the crowd burst into the
Tuileries, when for some hours it insulted the king and queen. Warmly
though he had espoused the principles of the Revolution, his patrician
blood boiled at the sight of these vulgar outrages, and he exclaimed:
"Why don't they sweep off four or five hundred of that _canaille_ with
cannon? The rest would then run away fast enough." The remark is
significant. If his brain approved the Jacobin creed, his instincts
were always with monarchy. His career was to reconcile his reason with
his instincts, and to impose on weary France the curious compromise of
a revolutionary Imperialism.

On August 10th, from the window of a shop near the Tuileries, he
looked down on the strange events which dealt the _coup de grace_ to
the dying monarchy. Again the chieftain within him sided against the
vulture rabble and with the well-meaning monarch who kept his troops
to a tame defensive. "If Louis XVI." (so wrote Buonaparte to his
brother Joseph) "had mounted his horse, the victory would have been
his--so I judge from the spirit which prevailed in the morning."
When all was over, when Louis sheathed his sword and went for
shelter to the National Assembly, when the f