viz., 1,120
francs, or less than L45, a year; but all reports agree as to his keen
zest for his profession and the recognition of his transcendent
abilities by his superior officers.[8] There it was that he mastered
the rudiments of war, for lack of which many generals of noble birth
have quickly closed in disaster careers that began with promise:
there, too, he learnt that hardest and best of all lessons, prompt
obedience. "To learn obeying is the fundamental art of governing,"
says Carlyle. It was so with Napoleon: at Valence he served his
apprenticeship in the art of conquering and the art of governing.

This spring-time of his life is of interest and importance in many
ways: it reveals many amiable qualities, which had hitherto been
blighted by the real or fancied scorn of the wealthy cadets. At
Valence, while shrinking from his brother officers, he sought society
more congenial to his simple tastes and restrained demeanour. In a few
of the best bourgeois families of Valence he found happiness. There,
too, blossomed the tenderest, purest idyll of his life. At the country
house 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 o