CHAPTER NINE.
THE LONELY SCHOOL-BOY While Napoleon was at Autun school, studying French, and preparing for entrance into the military academy, his father, Charles Bonaparte, was at Versailles, trying to get a little more money from the king, in return for his services as Corsica's delegate to France.
At the same time he was working to complete the arrangements which should permit him to enter Napoleon at the military school, at the expense of the state.

This he finally accomplished; and on the twenty-third of April, in the year 1779, Napoleon entered the royal military school at Brienne.
There were ten of these military schools in France.

They were started as training-schools for boys who were to become officers in the French army.

The one at Brienne was a bare and ugly-looking lot of buildings in the midst of trees and gardens, looking down toward the little River Aube, and near to the fine old chateau, or nobleman's house, built, a hundred years before Napoleon's day, by the last Count of Brienne.
There were a hundred and fifty boys at Brienne school, although there was scarcely room enough for a hundred and twenty.
The new-comer was therefore crowded in with the others; and you may be sure that the old boys did not make life pleasant and easy for the new boy.
Although he had learned to write and speak French during his three months' schooling at Autun, he could not, of course, speak it very well; so the boys plagued him for that.

And when he told them his name, they, too, made fun of his pronunciation of Na-po-le-one, and at once nicknamed him, "straw-nose," just as the Autun boys had done.
Most of the boys who attended Brienne school were the sons of French noblemen.