He threw his eye over two or three pages, and tossed it into the fire.

The treatise of the Lieutenant probably abounded in opinions which the Emperor had found it convenient to forget.
Even at Brienne his political feelings had been determined.

At Valance he found the officers of his regiment divided, as all the world then was, into two parties; the lovers of the French Monarchy, and those who desired its overthrow.

He sided openly with the latter.

"Had I been a general," said Napoleon in the evening of his life, "I might have adhered to the king: being a subaltern, I joined the patriots." In the beginning of 1792 he became captain of artillery (_unattached;_) and, happening to be in Paris, witnessed the lamentable scenes of the 20th of June, when the revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries, and the king and his family, after undergoing innumerable insults and degradations, with the utmost difficulty preserved their lives.