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 commission 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.

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