trician families of the island. Many of them
had resented the dictatorship of Paoli; and they now gladly accepted
the connection with France, which promised to enrich their country and
to open up a brilliant career in the French army, where commissions
were limited to the scions of nobility.

Much may be said in excuse of Charles Buonaparte's decision, and no
one can deny that Corsica has ultimately gained much by her connection
with France. But his change of front was open to the charge that it
was prompted by self-interest rather than by philosophic foresight. At
any rate, his second son throughout his boyhood nursed a deep
resentment against his father for his desertion of the patriots'
cause. The youth's sympathies were with the peasants, whose allegiance
was not to be bought by baubles, whose constancy and bravery long held
out against the French in a hopeless guerilla warfare. His hot
Corsican blood boiled at the stories of oppression and insult which he
heard from his humbler compatriots. When, at eleven years of age, he
saw in the military college at Brienne the portrait of Choiseul, the
French Minister who had urged on the conquest of Corsica, his passion
burst forth in a torrent of imprecations against the traitor; and,
even after the death of his father in 1785, he exclaimed that he could
never forgive him for not following Paoli into exile.

What trifles seem, at times, to alter the current of human affairs!
Had his father acted thus, the young Napoleon would in all probability
have entered the military or naval service of Great Britain; he might
have shared Paoli's enthusiasm for the land of his adoption, and have
followed the Corsican hero in his enterprises against the French
Revolution, thenceforth figuring in history merely as a greater
Marlborough, crushing the military efforts of democratic France, and
luring England into a career of Continental conquest. Monarchy and
aristocracy would have gone unchallenged, except within the "natural
limits" of France; and the other nations, never shaken to their
inmost depths, would have dragged on their old inert fragmentary
existence.

The decision of Charles Buonaparte altered the destiny of Europe. He
determined that his eldest boy, Joseph, should enter the Church, and
that Napoleon should be a soldier. His perception of the characters of
his boys was correct. An anecdote, for which the elder brother is
responsible, throws a flood of light on their temperame