f "sensibility." Even the family troubles could not
damp his ardour. His father had embarked on questionable speculations,
which now threatened the Buonapartes with bankruptcy, unless the
French Government proved to be complacent and generous. With the hope
of pressing one of the family claims on the royal exchequer, the
second son procured an extension of furlough and sped to Paris. There
at the close of 1787 he spent several weeks, hopefully endeavouring to
extract money from the bankrupt Government. It was a season of
disillusionment in more senses than one; for there he saw for himself
the seamy side of Parisian life, and drifted for a brief space about
the giddy vortex of the Palais Royal. What a contrast to the limpid
life of Corsica was that turbid frothy existence--already swirling
towards its mighty plunge!

After a furlough of twenty-one months he rejoined his regiment, now at
Auxonne. There his health suffered considerably, not only from the
miasma of the marshes of the river Saone, but also from family
anxieties and arduous literary toils. To these last it is now needful
to refer. Indeed, the external events of his early life are of value
only as they reveal the many-sidedness of his nature and the growth of
his mental powers.

How came he to outgrow the insular patriotism of his early years? The
foregoing recital of facts must have already suggested one obvious
explanation. Nature had dowered him so prodigally with diverse gifts,
mainly of an imperious order, that he could scarcely have limited his
sphere of action to Corsica. Profoundly as he loved his island, it
offered no sphere commensurate with his varied powers and masterful
will. It was no empty vaunt which his father had uttered on his
deathbed that his Napoleon would one day overthrow the old monarchies
and conquer Europe.[9] Neither did the great commander himself
overstate the peculiarity of his temperament, when he confessed that
his instincts had ever prompted him that his will must prevail, and
that what pleased him must of necessity belong to him. Most spoilt
children harbour the same illusion, for a brief space. But all the
buffetings of fortune failed to drive it from the young Buonaparte;
and when despair as to his future might have impaired the vigour of
his domineering instincts, his mind and will acquired a fresh rigidity
by coming under the spell of that philosophizing doctrinaire,
Rousseau.

There was every reason why he should ea