clesiastical
assumption of supreme power in the state.

Some of the lagging days were spent not only in novel-reading, as the
Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Remusat, but in attempts
at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that
first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough
remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the
dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged. Many entertain
a suspicion that amid the gaieties of the winter he had really lost
his heart, or thought he had, and was repulsed. At least, in his
"Dialogue on Love," written five years later, he says, "I, too, was
once in love," and proceeds, after a few lines, to decry the sentiment
as harmful to mankind, a something from which God would do well to
emancipate it. This may have referred to his first meeting and
conversation with a courtesan at Paris, which he describes in one of
his papers, but this is not likely from the context, which is not
concerned with the gratification of sexual passion. It is of the
nobler sentiment that he speaks, and there seems to have been in the
interval no opportunity for philandering so good as the one he had
enjoyed during his boyish acquaintance with Mlle. Caroline du
Colombier. It has, at all events, been her good fortune to secure, by
this supposition, a place in history, not merely as the first girl
friend of Napoleon, but as the object of his first pure passion.

But these were his avocations; the real occupation of his time was
study. Besides reading again the chief works of Rousseau, and
devouring those of Raynal, his most beloved author, he also read much
in the works of Voltaire, of Filangieri, of Necker, and of Adam
Smith. With note-book and pencil he extracted, annotated, and
criticized, his mind alert and every faculty bent to the clear
apprehension of the subject in hand. To the conception of the state as
a private corporation, which he had imbibed from Rousseau, was now
added the conviction that the institutions of France were no longer
adapted to the occupations, beliefs, or morals of her people, and that
revolution was a necessity. To judge from a memoir presented some
years later to the Lyons Academy, he must have absorbed the teachings
of the "Two Indies" almost entire.

The consuming zeal for studies on the part of this incomprehensible
youth is probably unparalleled. Having read Plutarch in his childhood,
he now d