The first extant manuscript of Napoleon, written at Valence in April, 1786, shows that he sought in Rousseau’s armoury the logical weapons for demonstrating the “right” of the Corsicans to rebel against the French.  The young hero-worshipper begins by noting that it is the birthday of Paoli.  He plunges into a panegyric on the Corsican patriots, when he is arrested by the thought that many censure them for rebelling at all.  “The divine laws forbid revolt.  But what have divine laws to do with a purely human affair?  Just think of the absurdity—­divine laws universally forbidding the casting off of a usurping yoke! ...  As for human laws, there cannot be any after the prince violates them.”  He then postulates two origins for government as alone possible.  Either the people has established laws and submitted itself to the prince, or the prince has established laws.  In the first case, the prince is engaged by the very nature of his office to execute the covenants.  In the second case, the laws tend, or do not tend, to the welfare of the people, which is the aim of all government:  if they do not, the contract with the prince dissolves of itself, for the people then enters again into its primitive state.  Having thus proved the sovereignty of the people, Buonaparte uses his doctrine to justify Corsican revolt against France, and thus concludes his curious medley:  “The Corsicans, following all the laws of justice, have been able to shake off the yoke of the Genoese, and may do the same with that of the French.  Amen.”

Five days later he again gives the reins to his melancholy.  “Always alone, though in the midst of men,” he faces the thought of suicide.  With an innate power of summarizing and balancing thoughts and sensations, he draws up arguments for and against this act.  He is in the dawn of his days and in four months’ time he will see “la patrie,” which he has not seen since childhood.  What joy!  And yet—­how men have fallen away from nature:  how cringing are his compatriots to their conquerors:  they are no longer the enemies of tyrants, of luxury, of vile courtiers:  the French have corrupted their morals, and when “la patrie” no longer survives, a good patriot ought to die.  Life among the French is odious:  their modes of life differ from his as much as the light of the moon differs from that of the sun.—­A strange effusion this for a youth of seventeen living amidst the full glories of the spring in Dauphine.  It was only a few weeks before the ripening of cherries.  Did that cherry-idyll with Mdlle. de Colombier lure him back to life?  Or did the hope of striking a blow for Corsica stay his suicidal hand?  Probably the latter; for we find him shortly afterwards tilting against a Protestant minister of Geneva who had ventured to criticise one of the dogmas of Rousseau’s evangel.