But all his life he bobbed like a cork to the surface of events, or with equal facility sank beneath them.  He seems to have been “everything by turns, and nothing long.”  Among other employments he became an impressario, and went with an opera troupe to Italy.  There for a time he kept a gaming table, and finally turned up at Joseph Bonaparte’s court at Naples.  He became popular with King Joseph, and followed him to Madrid.  He was a French Micawber, without the domestic affections of his English counterpart, but with far more brilliant chances.  His wife was left to struggle at Marseilles with her own boy to support, and with a host of step-children.  What she would have done but for the kindness of her mother, Madame Arnic, it is hard to tell.

Meantime Adolphe was adopted and educated by Madame Arnic.  She had provided him from his birth with influential patrons in the persons of two well-to-do godfathers.  The boy was brought up in one of those beautiful bastides, or sea-and-country villas, which adorn the shores of Provence.  There he ran wild with the little peasant boys, and subsequently in Marseilles with the gamins of the city.

His cousin, the poet Andre Chenier, got him an appointment to one of the lycees, or high-schools, established by Napoleon; but his grandmother would not hear of his “wearing Bonaparte’s livery.”  The two god-fathers had to threaten to apply to the absent Micawber on the subject, if the boy’s mother and grandmother stood in the way of his education.  They yielded at last, and accepted the appointment offered them.  Adolphe passed with high marks into the institution, and it cost him no trouble to keep always at the head of his classes.  But in play hours there was never a more troublesome boy.  He so perplexed and annoyed his superiors that they were on the eve of expelling him, when a new master came to the lycee from Paris, and all was changed.  This master had ruined his prospects by writing a pamphlet against the Empire.  A warm friendship sprang up between him and his brilliant pupil.  The good man was an unbending republican.  When Thiers became Prime Minister of France under Louis Philippe, he wrote to his old master and offered him an important post in the Bureau of Public Instruction; but the old man refused it.  He would not accept Louis Philippe as “the best of republics,” and ended his letter by saying:  “The best thing I can wish you is that you may soon retire from office, and that for a long time.”

The influence of this new teacher roused all Thiers’ faculties and stimulated his industry.  From that time forward he became the most industrious man of his age.  The bulletins and the victories of Napoleon excited his imagination.  He would take a bulletin for his theme, and write up an account of a battle, supplementing his few facts by his own vivid imagination.  His idea was that France must be the strongest of European powers, or she would prove the weakest; she could not hold a middle place in the federation of European nations.