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 of “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.