eon clinched his little fist, and turned hotly on his tormentor.
But he was already learning the lesson of self-control.

"And how did you do it, Frenchman?" he replied. "By numbers. If you had
been but four to one against us, you would never have conquered us. But,
behold! you were ten to one! That is too much to struggle against."

"And yet you boast of your general--your leader," said the other boy.
"You say he is a fine commander--this--how do you call him?--this
Paoli."

"I say so; yes, sir," Napoleon replied sadly. Then, as if his ambition
led him on, he added, "I would like to be like him. What could I not do
then!"

This feeling of being a Corsican, an outsider at the school, made the
boy quiet and retiring. He kept by himself, just as he had at home when
things did not suit him; he walked out alone, and played with no one. To
be sure, he was more or less with his brother Joseph, who loved his
ease and comfort, did not fire up when the other boys teased him, and
smoothed over many a quarrel between them and his brother.

Napoleon would often find fault with Joseph's lack of spirit, as he
called it; but Joseph, all through life, liked to take things easy, and
hated to face trouble. Most of us do, you know; but it was the readiness
of Napoleon to boldly face danger, and to attempt what appeared to be
the impossible, that made him the self-reliant boy, the successful man,
the conqueror, the emperor, the hero.

CHAPTER NINE

THE LONELY SCHOOL-BOY

While Napoleon was at Autun school, studying French, and preparing for
entrance into the military academy, his father, Charles Bonaparte, was
at Versailles, trying to get a little more money from the king, in
return for his services as Corsica's delegate to France.

At the same time he was working to complete the arrangements which
should permit him to enter Napoleon at the military school, at the
expense of the state. This he finally accomplished; and on the
twenty-third of April, in the year 1779, Napoleon entered the royal
military school at Brienne.

There were ten of these military schools in France. They were started
as training-schools for boys who were to become officers in the French
army. The one at Brienne was a bare and ugly-looking lot of buildings
in the midst of trees and gardens, looking down toward the little River
Aube, and near to the fine old chateau, or nobleman's house, built, a
hundred years before Napoleon's day, by the last Count