At Brienne, he keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I can!"-- "Corsican by nation and character," wrote his professor of history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if circumstances favor him."[1116]--Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at Valence and Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old bitterness returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when our country perished.

Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood--such was the odious spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from my birth...

I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with the brush of infamy....

vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[1117] A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent Assembly and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long strain of renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying to restrain it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over, like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective .-- From the age of fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds refuge in imagination in the past of his island;[1118] he recounts its history, his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his work to Paoli.

Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and dedicates the abridgment to Abbe Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style, with warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its revolts and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves, and murders,--in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish highlanders, while the style, still more than the sympathies, denotes the foreigner.