as Gardes du corps. After the massacre of the 6th October 1789 that devoted corps had ceased to exist; and, though an ignorant civilian or provincial might have misapplied the term Garde du corps to one of the Swiss Guards-the only guards massacred on the 10th of August-such a misnomer was not possible in the case of a captain of artillery, who must have known the one from the other quite as distinctly as an English officer would one of Lord Combermere's Life Guards from one of Lord Foley's Beef-eaters.

But we may spare all conjecture on this particular point, for we have the direct evidence of Buonaparte himself that-whether he wrote or Joseph invented the foregoing paragraph-it is essentially false. Here is his own account, dictated in St. Helena, and given by Las Cases as his ipsissima verba :

'On that hideous day, the 10th of August, I was at Paris, and lodged in the Rue du Mail, near the Place des Victoires. At the sound of the tocsin and a rumour that they were attacking the Tuileries, I ran to the Carrousel to the house of Fauvelet, Bourrienne's brother, who kept a furniture shop there. From that I could see

at my ease all the details of the affair (la journée). Before I got to the Carrousel, I had met in the Rue Croix des Petits Champs a group of hideous men, parading a human head* on a pike. Seeing me tolerably (passablement) dressed, and thinking that I looked like a monsieur, they advanced upon me, to make me cry "Vive la Nation!" which I made no difficulty in doing, as may be well believed.'-Las Cases,

v. 129.

This is natural and probable—and his discreet reluctance to have anything to do with these people is obviously inconsistent with his volunteering so soon after to interfere in their proceedings. He then proceeds to say :

'When the Palace was stormed and the King had gone to the Assembly, I ventured (hasardai) to make my way into the garden. Never since did any of my battles give me the idea of so many corpses as I there saw of the Swiss-whether it was the narrowness of the space or its being the first impression of the kind I had yet felt. I saw women-well-dressed women--committing the most shocking indecencies on those bodies. I visited all the cafés in the neighbourhood. There I found the most extraordinary violence: rage was in every heart and apparent on every face, and, though there was nothing very particular in my dress, or perhaps because my countenance was more composed and calm, I saw that I was looked at with eyes of suspicion and hostility.'-ib.

*This was no doubt the head of one of the nine gentlemen massacred early in the morning in the Cour des Feuillans before a shot was fired. Their bodies were carried by the mob to the Place Vendôme, where the heads were cut off and thence paraded through the town stuck on pikes. See Peltier's most interesting 'Histoire du Dix Août.'

Thus

Thus it was not till the affair was over that he ventured on the scene of massacre, and—far from thinking that his influence could save anybody-he did not feel himself altogether safe:and, in short, nothing can be more irreconcileable with the theatrical fanfaronnade which Joseph ascribes to him. We can only leave the conflicting statements of the two brothers to the judgment of our readers.

We find in M. Libri's papers evidence of two very curious circumstances that relate to this period; the first is, that it appears that in 1791 Napoleon was in the receipt of a pension from Louis XVI. This would sufficiently account for his disapprobation of the 20th June' and '10th August.' Perhaps it may turn out that his absence from his regiment may have arisen from loyalty to the king, and that he was a kind of emigrant and thus entitled to some support from the royalist ministers. The second circumstance, still more curious, may have some connexion with the former; it is that those papers contain his original commission as captain, signed by the Kingnot dated, as was always supposed, the 6th February, 1792,' but the 30th August, with a note that he was to take rank from the 5th February. This explains why he was, as Bourrienne represents, without employment, on the pavé of Paris, during the earlier half of 1792, but it is not so clear how a commission from the King should bear date three weeks after the unhappy sovereign had been a close prisoner in the Temple. We can only suppose that Napoleon had interest to get a commission which had been ante-signed in blank filled up in his favour, with a reference for rank to the date of his earlier solicitation. It seems, however, that he did not proceed with this commission to join his regiment: on the contrary, it appears that, instead of joining his regiment, he must have proceeded direct from Paris for Corsica, where we find him early in September, and where he remained without any indication of his belonging to the regular army for several months, during which period he was nominated Lieutenant-Colonel of a battalion of National Guards, with which on the 12th of February, 1793, he formed a portion of an expedition against Sardinia, which totally failed; Buonaparte and his corps appear to have been detached on some minor branch of this service, and not to have fired a shot.

Whether, as the Libri papers seem to indicate, Napoleon originally entertained royalist opinions or not, it is certain that up to the deposition of the King the Buonapartes were attached both personally and politically to Paoli, but they now broke with that true patriot, made themselves prominent in the revolutionary

revolutionary party, and became decided Jacobins, so much to the dissatisfaction of their fellow citizens that in the spring of 1793 there was an actual insurrection of the people against them, followed by a decree of banishment by Paoli's government. Under this proscription the whole family left the island, and sought an asylum as persecuted republicans in the neighbourhood of Marseilles, where they-the mother, Joseph, Napoleon, and seven younger children-had no means whatsoever of existence but rations from the public stores, which the Convention granted to exiled indigent patriots.

It is now that, for the first time for three or four years, Joseph gives us a hint that Napoleon was still an officer in the French army, by telling us that he now joined at Nice the regiment in which he was captain. But this seems questionable, and the same obscurity about his connexion with the army still continues. Joseph gives no date of this attempt to join the regiment at Nice -but if made, Napoleon seems to have met with some difficulty in being readmitted to a service from which he had been so long absent; for we find in the Itinéraire Général de Napoléon,'-a meagre but useful chronological register of each day's whereabout of Napoleon's life-we find, we say, in the Itinéraire, under the date of the 26th of May, 1793, that he had no sooner joined his regiment than he left it again—' après avoir quitté son régiment à Nice, Bonaparte fait un voyage à Paris ;" and in the following month it appears that-'de retour à son corps Bonaparte est employé dans l'armée du Général Carteaux.” This journey to Paris Joseph does not mention, but both he and the Itinéraire assert that he rejoined the Army of the South. Napoleon himself tells a different story, and not, we think, the true one-that he was sent direct from Paris to Toulon.. We think there can be no doubt that he joined Carteaux' army before he was employed at Toulon.

But even at Toulon a strange obscurity seems to cover services which we are told were so brilliant. The only mentionexcept his own-we find of his share in that business is the following paragraph of General Dugommier's despatch of the sharp action of the 30th of November, in the third month of the siege:

'I cannot say too much for the good conduct of those of my brothers in arms who would fight. Amongst those who did, and who helped me to rally the runaways to a renewal of the attack, were the citizens Buona Parte commanding the artillery, and Arena and Cervoni Adjutants-General.'-Moniteur, 7th December, 1793.

Some curious observations arise out of this extract. First, the confession of the misbehaviour of the French troops on the day

(30th of November) which, through General O'Hara's rashness, ended so unfortunately for the English—then, the singularity that the only three officers who were distinguished by a better spirit were three Corsicans—then, the fatality by which, just seven years later, we find Buonaparte First Consul, and sending Arena, the partner in his first glory, to the scaffold for his share in the affair of the infernal machine (December 1800). Cervoni was killed at Eckmulh in 1807. It is to be observed also that the praise of Buonaparte was not for the scientific operations of the siege, but for an incidental display of gallantry, the more creditable to him as somewhat out of the sphere of a mere artillery officer.

This

On the faith of the great talents he has since displayed, we cannot doubt that his artillery services were as distinguished as his gallantry on the field, but we repeat that we have found no other evidence of it but his own. Joseph's account is so short and confused, that he seems to make himself a superior-certainly a senior officer to Napoleon. Joseph's story is that he was 'employed as Chef de bataillon on the staff at that siege, where he was slightly wounded at the attack of Cape Brun' (i. 55). gloriole, if true, would be but a paltry one in the ex-King; but we believe it to be only another instance of the small tricks by which Napoleon would endeavour to facilitate larger ones. It turns out that in 1804, when Napoleon began to meditate bringing Joseph forward as a more prominent tool, he thought it would serve his designs to give him the military character which was the distinguishing mark of the new empire, and he accordingly forced him into the army, and conferred on him by a formal decree the rank of Colonel of the 4th regiment of the line, then forming part of 'the Army of England,' which is really so curious, such a much ado about nothing, that we must give a specimen of it as Joseph exhibits it, under the title of Pièce Justificative :'

'BREVET DE COLONEL POUR LE CITOYEN BUONAparte (Joseph). 'CAMPAGNES, ACTIONS, BLESSURES.

DETAILS DE SERVICES.

Né le 5 (!) Janvier, 1768.

Elève d'artillerie en 1783.

Officier de l'état-major en 1792.

Adjutant-Général.

Bataillon en 1793.'

Chef de

Then follows the order for his reception as Colonel of the 4th of the line.

This decree, besides being issued as a kind of proclamation to the public, signed and countersigned by the Consul, the Secretary of State, and the Minister of War, was also announced by a special message, similarly signed, to the Conservative Senate, commencing with these words

• The

'The senator Joseph Buonaparte, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, having expressed to me his desire to share the perils of the army now encamped on the shores of Boulogne.'-i. 122.

And this communication was acknowledged by a long and disgustingly servile address (given at full length), presented to the First Consul by a deputation of the Senate; and, finally, the new Colonel's arrival at the head-quarters of the Army of England, namely, the village of Pont de Brique, near Boulogne, is promulgated to the troops, by an order of the day trumpetting the gratitude of the army to the government for adding to its ranks one of the first personages in the State,' &c. This piece of absurd and abject adulation is signed Soult; and the whole exhibits a solemn farce, unequalled since Caligula made his horse a consul. Well-the whole was built on a fiction, as Joseph himself confesses in another part of his autobiographywhere also he tells us what he takes to be the motive of all this absurd manœuvring:

'The First Consul would have me belong to the army. There was a good deal of uneasiness in the public mind about the conspiracies against his life. My fraternal affection for his person, and his reliance on my character and opinions, left him no reluctance to have ME for his successor, but he would have me become a military man. I was then near forty; I had all my life been in the civil service, except for a few months of our first campaign in Italy [1796]. I was reluctant to be a colonel.'-i. 95.

What becomes now of the ostentatious certificate of his having been a Chef de bataillon, and of the campaigns of 1793 and 1794?' The few months' (weeks he might have better said) which he quotes as an exception from his civil life were no exception, for he accompanied his brother as a mere civilian. In fact, if the former tale and its 'pièce justificative' had had any reality, Joseph would have been a senior officer to Napoleon. Joseph tells us in his first story that he was a Chef de bataillon at the siege of Toulon. He does not, indeed, pretend to give us the date of this supposed commission, but it must have been some time before he was wounded, as he says, in that rank at Cape Brun. Now, the skirmish of Cape Brun was on the 15th Oct., 1793, and it happens oddly enough that Napoleon's own commission as Chef de bataillon was dated four days later-the 19th of the same month. But there is another circumstance which confirms Joseph's last statement, and annihilates the first and its pièce justificative. We have before us the army list in the National Almanack for 1793-4. This almanack was made up to the 6th December, 1793, and published a few days later. In it we find Napoleon in his new rank of Chef de bataillon, and we find Joseph

also