In his temperament as in the circumstances of his time the young Buonaparte was destined for an extraordinary career.  Into a tottering civilization he burst with all the masterful force of an Alaric.  But he was an Alaric of the south, uniting the untamed strength of his island kindred with the mental powers of his Italian ancestry.  In his personality there is a complex blending of force and grace, of animal passion and mental clearness, of northern common sense with the promptings of an oriental imagination; and this union in his nature of seeming opposites explains many of the mysteries of his life.  Fortunately for lovers of romance, genius cannot be wholly analyzed, even by the most adroit historical philosophizer or the most exacting champion of heredity.  But in so far as the sources of Napoleon’s power can be measured, they may be traced to the unexampled needs of mankind in the revolutionary epoch and to his own exceptional endowments.  Evidently, then, the characteristics of his family claim some attention from all who would understand the man and the influence which he was to wield over modern Europe.

It has been the fortune of his House to be the subject of dispute from first to last.  Some writers have endeavoured to trace its descent back to the Caesars of Rome, others to the Byzantine Emperors; one genealogical explorer has tracked the family to Majorca, and, altering its name to Bonpart, has discovered its progenitor in the Man of the Iron Mask; while the Duchesse d’Abrantes, voyaging eastwards in quest of its ancestors, has confidently claimed for the family a Greek origin.  Painstaking research has dispelled these romancings of historical trouveurs, and has connected this enigmatic stock with a Florentine named “William, who in the year 1261 took the surname of Bonaparte or Buonaparte.  The name seems to have been assumed when, amidst the unceasing strifes between Guelfs and Ghibellines that rent the civic life of Florence, William’s party, the Ghibellines, for a brief space gained the ascendancy.  But perpetuity was not to be found in Florentine politics; and in a short time he was a fugitive at a Tuscan village, Sarzana, beyond the reach of the victorious Guelfs.  Here the family seems to have lived for wellnigh three centuries, maintaining its Ghibelline and aristocratic principles with surprising tenacity.  The age was not remarkable for the virtue of constancy, or any other virtue.  Politics and private life were alike demoralized by unceasing intrigues; and amidst strifes of Pope and Emperor, duchies and republics, cities and autocrats, there was formed that type of Italian character which is delineated in the pages of Macchiavelli.  From the depths of debasement of that cynical age the Buonapartes were saved by their poverty, and by the isolation of their life at Sarzana.  Yet the embassies discharged at intervals by the more talented members of the family showed that the gifts for intrigue were only dormant; and they were certainly transmitted in their intensity to the greatest scion of the race.