s his contempt and indignation. "Poor driveller!" said Napoleon,
loud enough to be heard by those near him, "how could he suffer this
rabble to enter? If he had swept away five or six hundred with his
cannon, the rest would be running yet." He was also a witness of the
still more terrible 10th of August, when, the palace being once more
invested, the National Guard assigned for its defence took part with the
assailants; the royal family were obliged to take refuge in the National
Assembly, and the brave Swiss Guards were massacred almost to a man in
the courts of the Tuileries. Buonaparte was a firm friend to the
Assembly, to the charge of a party of which, at least, these excesses
must be laid; but the spectacle disgusted him. The yells, screams, and
pikes with bloody heads upon them, formed a scene which he afterwards
described as "hideous and revolting." At this time Napoleon was without
employment and very poor; and De Bourienne describes him as wandering
idly about Paris, living, chiefly at his (M. de B.'s) expense, at
restaurateurs' shops, and, among other wild-enough schemes, proposing
that he and his schoolfellow should take some houses on lease, and
endeavour to get a little money by subletting them in apartments. Such
were the views and occupations of Buonaparte--at the moment when the
national tragedy was darkening to its catastrophe. As yet he had been
but a spectator of the Revolution, destined to pave his own path to
sovereign power; it was not long before circumstances called on him to
play a part.

General Paoli, who had lived in England ever since the termination of
that civil war in which Charles Buonaparte served under his banner, was
cheered, when the great French Revolution first broke out, with the hope
that liberty was about to be restored to Corsica. He came to Paris, was
received with applause as a tried friend of freedom, and appointed
governor of his native island, which for some time he ruled wisely and
happily. But as the revolution advanced, Paoli, like most other wise
men, became satisfied that license was more likely to be established by
its leaders, than law and rational liberty; and avowing his aversion to
the growing principles of Jacobinism, and the scenes of tumult and
bloodshed to which they gave rise, he was denounced in the National
Assembly as the enemy of France. An expedition was sent to deprive him
of his government, under the command of La Combe, Michel, and Salicetti,
one of