time in gaining recruits who would vote for him.  He further assured his success by having one of the commissioners, who was acting in Paoli’s interest, carried off from his friends and detained at the Buonapartes’ house in Ajaccio—­his first coup[16] Stranger events were to follow.  At Easter, when the people were excited by the persecuting edicts against the clergy and the closing of a monastery, there was sharp fighting between the populace and Buonaparte’s companies of National Guards.  Originating in a petty quarrel, which was taken up by eager partisans, it embroiled the whole of the town and gave the ardent young Jacobin the chance of overthrowing his enemies.  His plans even extended to the seizure of the citadel, where he tried to seduce the French regiment from its duty to officers whom he dubbed aristocrats.  The attempt was a failure.  The whole truth can, perhaps, scarcely be discerned amidst the tissue of lies which speedily enveloped the affair; but there can be no doubt that on the second day of strife Buonaparte’s National Guards began the fight and subsequently menaced the regular troops in the citadel.  The conflict was finally stopped by commissioners sent by Paoli; and the volunteers were sent away from the town.

Buonaparte’s position now seemed desperate.  His conduct exposed him to the hatred of most of his fellow-citizens and to the rebukes of the French War Department.  In fact, he had doubly sinned:  he had actually exceeded his furlough by four months:  he was technically guilty, first of desertion, and secondly of treason.  In ordinary times he would have been shot, but the times were extraordinary, and he rightly judged that when a Continental war was brewing, the most daring course was also the most prudent, namely, to go to Paris.  Thither Paoli allowed him to proceed, doubtless on the principle of giving the young madcap a rope wherewith to hang himself.

On his arrival at Marseilles, he hears that war has been declared by France against Austria; for the republican Ministry, which Louis XVI. had recently been compelled to accept, believed that war against an absolute monarch would intensify revolutionary fervour in France and hasten the advent of the Republic.  Their surmises were correct.  Buonaparte, on his arrival at Paris, witnessed the closing scenes of the reign of Louis XVI.  On June 20th he saw the crowd burst into the Tuileries, when for some hours it insulted the king and queen.  Warmly though he had espoused the principles of the Revolution, his patrician blood boiled at the sight of these vulgar outrages, and he exclaimed:  “Why don’t they sweep off four or five hundred of that canaille with cannon?  The rest would then run away fast enough.”  The remark is significant.  If his brain approved the Jacobin creed, his instincts were always with monarchy.  His career was to reconcile his reason with his instincts, and to impose on weary France the curious compromise of a revolutionary Imperialism.