Bourienne says he often told him--"Hereafter I will do the French what harm I can; as for you, you never make me your jest--you love me." From the beginning of the revolutionary struggle, boy and youth, he espoused and kept by the side of those who desired the total change of government.

It is a strange enough fact, that Pichegru, afterwards so eminent and ultimately so unfortunate, was for some time his monitor in the school of Brienne.

Being consulted many years later as to the chance of enlisting Buonaparte in the cause of the exiled Bourbons, this man is known to have answered: "It will be lost time to attempt that--I knew him in his youth--he has taken his side, and he will not change it." In 1783 Buonaparte was, on the recommendation of his masters, sent from Brienne to the Royal Military School at Paris; this being an extraordinary compliment to the genius and proficiency of a boy of fifteen.[5] Here he spent nearly two years, devoted to his studies.

That he laboured hard, both at Brienne and at Paris, we may judge; for his after-life left scanty room for book-work, and of the vast quantity of information which his strong memory ever placed at his disposal, the far greater proportion must have been accumulated now.

He made himself a first-rate mathematician; he devoured history--his chosen authors being Plutarch and Tacitus; the former the most simple painter that antiquity has left us of heroic characters--the latter the profoundest master of political wisdom.