first commission as
second lieutenant in the artillery regiment _La Fere_. His corps was at
Valance when he joined it; and he mingled, more largely than might have
been expected from his previous habits, in the cultivated society of the
place. His personal advantages were considerable; the outline of the
countenance classically beautiful; the eye deep-set and dazzlingly
brilliant; the figure short, but slim, active, and perfectly knit.
Courtly grace and refinement of manners he never attained, nor perhaps
coveted; but he early learned the art, not difficult probably to any
person possessed of such genius and such accomplishments, of rendering
himself eminently agreeable wherever it suited his purpose or
inclination to be so.

On the 27th February in this year his father died of a cancer in the
stomach, aged forty-five; the same disease which was destined, at a
somewhat later period of life, to prove fatal to himself.

While at Valance Buonaparte competed anonymously for a prize offered by
the Academy of Lyons for the best answer to Raynal's Question: "What are
the principles and institutions by the application of which mankind can
be raised to the highest happiness?" He gained the prize: what were the
contents of his Essay we know not. Talleyrand, long afterwards, obtained
the manuscript, and, thinking to please his sovereign, brought it to
him. He threw his eye over two or three pages, and tossed it into the
fire. The treatise of the Lieutenant probably abounded in opinions which
the Emperor had found it convenient to forget.

Even at Brienne his political feelings had been determined. At Valance
he found the officers of his regiment divided, as all the world then
was, into two parties; the lovers of the French Monarchy, and those who
desired its overthrow. He sided openly with the latter. "Had I been a
general," said Napoleon in the evening of his life, "I might have
adhered to the king: being a subaltern, I joined the patriots."

In the beginning of 1792 he became captain of artillery (_unattached;_)
and, happening to be in Paris, witnessed the lamentable scenes of the
20th of June, when the revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries, and the
king and his family, after undergoing innumerable insults and
degradations, with the utmost difficulty preserved their lives. He
followed the crowd into the garden before the palace; and when Louis
XVI. appeared on a balcony with the red cap on his head, could no longer
suppres