never write Italian, much less French, with accuracy; and his tutor at Paris not inaptly described his boyish composition as resembling molten granite.  The same qualities of directness and impetuosity were also fatal to his efforts at mastering the movements of the dance.  In spite of lessons at Paris and private lessons which he afterwards took at Valence, he was never a dancer:  his bent was obviously for the exact sciences rather than the arts, for the geometrical rather than the rhythmical:  he thought, as he moved, in straight lines, never in curves.

The death of his father during the year which the youth spent at Paris sharpened his sense of responsibility towards his seven younger brothers and sisters.  His own poverty must have inspired him with disgust at the luxury which he saw around him; but there are good reasons for doubting the genuineness of the memorial which he is alleged to have sent from Paris to the second master at Brienne on this subject.  The letters of the scholars at Paris were subject to strict surveillance; and, if he had taken the trouble to draw up a list of criticisms on his present training, most assuredly it would have been destroyed.  Undoubtedly, however, he would have sympathized with the unknown critic in his complaint of the unsuitableness of sumptuous meals to youths who were destined for the hardships of the camp.  At Brienne he had been dubbed “the Spartan,” an instance of that almost uncanny faculty of schoolboys to dash off in a nickname the salient features of character.  The phrase was correct, almost for Napoleon’s whole life.  At any rate, the pomp of Paris served but to root his youthful affections more tenaciously in the rocks of Corsica.

In September, 1785, that is, at the age of sixteen, Buonaparte was nominated for a commision as junior lieutenant in La Fere regiment of artillery quartered at Valence on the Rhone.  This was his first close contact with real life.  The rules of the service required him to spend three months of rigorous drill before he was admitted to his commission.  The work was exacting:  the pay was small, 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.