His character was undoubtedly that of a young man who had the desire to get ahead faster than his opportunities would permit.

Solitude had made him uncommunicative and secretive; anxiety and privation had made him self-helpful and self-reliant; lack of sympathy had made him calculating; but doing for others had made him kind-hearted and generous.

His reading and study had made him ambitious; his knowledge that when he knew a thing he really knew it, made him masterful and desirous of leadership.

He had few of the vices, and sowed but a small crop of what is called the "wild oats" of youth; he abhorred debt, and scarcely ever owed a penny, even when in sorest straits; and, while not a bright nor a great scholar, what he had learned he was able to store away in his brain, to be drawn upon for use when, in later years, this knowledge could be used to advantage.
[Illustration: _Lieutenant Napoleon Bonaparte Aged 22 (from the portrait by Jean Baptiste Greuse, in the Museum at Versailles)_] Such at twenty years of age was Napoleon Bonaparte.

Such he remained through the years of his young manhood, meeting all sorts of discouragements, facing the hardest poverty, becoming disgusted with many things that occurred in those changing days, when liberty was replacing tyranny, and the lesson of free America was being read and committed by the world.
He saw the turmoil and terrors of the French Revolution--that season of blood, when a long-suffering people struck a blow at tyranny, murdered their king, and tried to build on the ruins of an overturned kingdom an impossible republic.
You will understand all this better when you come to read the history of France, and see through how many noble but mistaken efforts that fair European land struggled from tyranny to freedom.