Yet the records of his early life show that in his character there was a strain of true sentiment and affection.  In him Nature carved out a character of rock-like firmness, but she adorned it with flowers of human sympathy and tendrils of family love.  At his first parting from his brother Joseph at Autun, when the elder brother was weeping passionately, the little Napoleon dropped a tear:  but that, said the tutor, meant as much as the flood of tears from Joseph.  Love of his relatives was a potent factor of his policy in later life; and slander has never been able wholly to blacken the character of a man who loved and honoured his mother, who asserted that her advice had often been of the highest service to him, and that her justice and firmness of spirit marked her out as a natural ruler of men.  But when these admissions are freely granted, it still remains true that his character was naturally hard; that his sense of personal superiority made him, even as a child, exacting and domineering; and the sequel was to show that even the strongest passion of his youth, his determination to free Corsica from France, could be abjured if occasion demanded, all the force of his nature being thenceforth concentrated on vaster adventures.

* * * * *

CHAPTER II

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND CORSICA

“They seek to destroy the Revolution by attacking my person:  I will defend it, for I am the Revolution.”  Such were the words uttered by Buonaparte after the failure of the royalist plot of 1804.  They are a daring transcript of Louis XIV.’s “L’etat, c’est moi.”  That was a bold claim, even for an age attuned to the whims of autocrats:  but this of the young Corsican is even more daring, for he thereby equated himself with a movement which claimed to be wide as humanity and infinite as truth.  And yet when he spoke these words, they were not scouted as presumptuous folly:  to most Frenchmen they seemed sober truth and practical good sense.  How came it, one asks in wonder, that after the short space of fifteen years a world-wide movement depended on a single life, that the infinitudes of 1789 lived on only in the form, and by the pleasure, of the First Consul?  Here surely is a political incarnation unparalleled in the whole course of human history.  The riddle cannot be solved by history alone.  It belongs in part to the domain of psychology, when that science shall undertake the study, not merely of man as a unit, but of the aspirations, moods, and whims of communities and nations.  Meanwhile it will be our far humbler task to strive to point out the relation of Buonaparte to the Revolution, and to show how the mighty force of his will dragged it to earth.

The first questions that confront us are obviously these.  Were the lofty aims and aspirations of the Revolution attainable?  And, if so, did the men of 1789 follow them by practical methods?  To the former of these questions the present chapter will, in part at least, serve as an answer.  On the latter part of the problem the events described in later chapters will throw some light:  in them we shall see that the great popular upheaval let loose mighty forces that bore Buonaparte on to fortune.