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.

The Genevan philosopher had asserted that Christianity, by enthroning in the hearts of Christians the idea of a Kingdom not of this world, broke the unity of civil society, because it detached the hearts of its converts from the State, as from all earthly things.  To this the Genevan minister had successfully replied by quoting Christian teachings on the subject at issue.  But Buonaparte fiercely accuses the pastor of neither having understood, nor even read, “Le Contrat Social”:  he hurls at his opponent texts of Scripture which enjoin obedience to the laws:  he accuses Christianity of rendering men slaves to an anti-social tyranny, because its priests set up an authority in opposition to civil laws; and as for Protestantism, it propagated discords between its followers, and thereby violated civic unity.  Christianity, he argues, is a foe to civil government, for it aims at making men happy in this life by inspiring them with hope of a future life; while the aim of civil government is “to lend assistance to the feeble against the strong, and by this means to allow everyone to enjoy a sweet tranquillity, the road of happiness.”  He therefore concludes that Christianity and civil government are diametrically opposed.