as number 15 out of 16 candidates. But he overcame all
these difficulties through his absolute and unshakable belief in his own
destiny, and in his own glorious future. Ambition was the main-spring
of his life. The thought of self, the worship of that capital letter "N"
with which he signed all his letters, and which recurred forever in the
ornaments of his hastily constructed palaces, the absolute will to make
the name Napoleon the most important thing in the world next to the name
of God, these desires carried Napoleon to a pinnacle of fame which no
other man has ever reached.

When he was a half-pay lieutenant, young Bonaparte was very fond of the
"Lives of Famous Men" which Plutarch, the Roman historian, had written.
But he never tried to live up to the high standard of character set by
these heroes of the older days. Napoleon seems to have been devoid of
all those considerate and thoughtful sentiments which make men different
from the animals. It will be very difficult to decide with any degree of
accuracy whether he ever loved anyone besides himself. He kept a civil
tongue to his mother, but Letizia had the air and manners of a great
lady and after the fashion of Italian mothers, she knew how to rule her
brood of children and command their respect. For a few years he was fond
of Josephine, his pretty Creole wife, who was the daughter of a French
officer of Martinique and the widow of the Vicomte de Beauharnais,
who had been executed by Robespierre when he lost a battle against the
Prussians. But the Emperor divorced her when she failed to give him a
son and heir and married the daughter of the Austrian Emperor, because
it seemed good policy.

During the siege of Toulon, where he gained great fame as commander of
a battery, Napoleon studied Macchiavelli with industrious care. He
followed the advice of the Florentine statesman and never kept his word
when it was to his advantage to break it. The word "gratitude" did not
occur in his personal dictionary. Neither, to be quite fair, did he
expect it from others. He was totally indifferent to human suffering. He
executed prisoners of war (in Egypt in 1798) who had been promised their
lives, and he quietly allowed his wounded in Syria to be chloroformed
when he found it impossible to transport them to his ships. He
ordered the Duke of Enghien to be condemned to death by a prejudiced
court-martial and to be shot contrary to all law on the sole ground that
the "Bourbons n