er. On the twenty-eighth he wrote to his mother. Both
these letters are in existence, and sound like rhetorical school
exercises corrected by a tutor. That to his mother is, however,
dignified and affectionate, referring in a becoming spirit to the
support her children owed her. As if to show what a thorough child he
still was, the dreary little note closes with an odd postscript giving
the irrelevant news of the birth, two days earlier, of a royal
prince--the duke of Normandy! This may have been added for the benefit
of the censor who examined all the correspondence of the young men.

Some time before, General Marbeuf had married, and the pecuniary
supplies to his boy friend seem after that event to have stopped. Mme.
de Buonaparte was left with four infant children, the youngest,
Jerome, but three months old. Their great-uncle, Lucien, the
archdeacon, was kind, and Joseph, abandoning all his ambitions,
returned to be, if possible, the support of the family. Napoleon's
poverty was no longer relative or imaginary, but real and hard.
Drawing more closely than ever within himself, he became a still more
ardent reader and student, devoting himself with passionate industry
to examining the works of Rousseau, the poison of whose political
doctrines instilled itself with fiery and grateful stinging into the
thin, cold blood of the unhappy cadet. In many respects the
instruction he received was admirable, and there is a traditional
anecdote that he was the best mathematician in the school. But on the
whole he profited little by the short continuation of his studies at
Paris. The marvelous French style which he finally created for himself
is certainly unacademic in the highest degree; in the many courses of
modern languages he mastered neither German nor English, in fact he
never had more than a few words of either; his attainments in fencing
and horsemanship were very slender. Among all his comrades he made but
one friend, while two of them became in later life his embittered
foes. Phelipeaux thwarted him at Acre; Picot de Peccaduc became
Schwarzenberg's most trusted adviser in the successful campaigns of
Austria against France.

Whether to alleviate as soon as possible the miseries of his
destitution, or, as has been charged, to be rid of their querulous and
exasperating inmate, the authorities of the military school shortened
Buonaparte's stay to the utmost of their ability, and admitted him to
examination in August, 1785,