ll go on; if you
advise me to stop, I will go no further." The young historian's letter
teems with bad spelling and bad grammar, but it is saturated with the
spirit of his age. The chapters as they came to Raynal's hands are not
in existence so far as is known, and posterity can never judge how
monumental their author's assurance was. The abbe's reply was kindly,
but he advised the novice to complete his researches, and then to
rewrite his pieces. Buonaparte was not unwilling to profit by the
counsels he received: soon after, in July, 1786, he gave two orders to
a Genevese bookseller, one for books concerning Corsica, another for
the memoirs of Mme. de Warens and her servant Claude Anet, which are a
sort of supplement to Rousseau's "Confessions."

[Footnote 13: Masson (Napoleon inconnu, Vol. I, p. 160)
denies all the statements of this paragraph. He likewise
proves to his own satisfaction that Bonaparte was
neither in Lyons nor in Douay at this time. The
narrative here given is based on Coston and on Jung, who
follows the former in his reprint of the documents,
giving the very dubious reference, Mss. Archives de la
guerre. Although these manuscripts could not be found by
me, I am not willing to discard Jung's authority
completely nor to impugn his good faith. Men in office
frequently play strange pranks with official papers, and
these may yet be found. Moreover, there is some slight
collateral evidence. See Vieux: Napoleon a Lyon, p. 4,
and Souvenirs a l'usage des habitants de Douay. Douay,
1822.]

During May of the same year he jotted down with considerable fullness
his notions of the true relations between Church and State. He had
been reading Roustan's reply to Rousseau, and was evidently
overpowered with the necessity of subordinating ecclesiastical to
secular authority. The paper is rude and incomplete, but it shows
whence he derived his policy of dealing with the Pope and the Roman
Church in France. It has very unjustly been called an attempted
refutation of Christianity: it is nothing of the sort. Ecclesiasticism
and Christianity being hopelessly confused in his mind, he uses the
terms interchangeably in an academic and polemic discussion to prove
that the theory of the social contract must destroy all ec