Napoleon with them for a three-week holiday at the family chateau in
Thoisy-le-Desert. But Mgr Marbeuf, who had squared this arrangement
with the school at Brienne, had not quite calculated all the odds, for at the
end of the holiday the young Jean-Baptiste Champeaux was found to be
too ill to continue to Brienne; Marbeuf thus had to send his vicar, the
Abbe Harney, to take Napoleon over to Brienne - something he could
have done three weeks earlier.
Napoleon arrived in Brienne on 15 May 1779. The military 'college'
there, originally a monastery, stood at the foot of a hill dominated by the
chateau. A religious academy from 1730, it had become a military school
in 1776, one of ten (later twelve) such schools set up to replace the Ecole
Royale Militaire in Paris, which had been wound up that year on grounds
of cost. It was still run by monks and the religious ethos was dominant,
but the Minimes of the Order of St Benedict were poor and ignorant, the
Brienne school was underfunded so could not afford to engage top-class
teachers, was the lowest-ranked of all ten military colleges and had the
lowest student enrolment (around 150) as against a top military school
like La FU:che (with nearly 500). Its aim was to prepare the sons of the
nobility for eventual cadetships in the armed services but, apart from a
course in fortification in the final year, the education was not remotely
military, but rather a variant of the standard training of the eighteenth
century gentleman. The theory was that the best pupils would be selected
for the artillery, the engineers and the navy, and the mediocre ones for
the infantry; only those too stupid even for the cavalry would be sent
back in disgrace to their families.
In this sleepy town on the vast open plains of Champagne Napoleon
spent five years. He often professed an admiration for Sparta, but here he
had to live like a Spartan of old. There were two corridors, both of which
contained seventy cells, each six feet square, furnished with a strap bed, a
water jug and a basin. St udents were locked into their cells at 10 p.m., in
a vain attempt to stamp out homosexual practices which were rampant at
the Brienne school. In an emergency a pupil could press a bell which
communicated with the corridor where a servant slept. At 6 a.m. reveille
sounded. After a breakfast of bread and water and some fruit in a
common dining-hall which seated 180 persons, lessons began. The
morning was given over to Latin, history, mathematics, geography,
drawing and some German. A t wo-hour lunch break followed, where the
standard of food improved. A typical menu contained soup, bouilli, roast
meat, salad and dessert. Teaching in the afternoon concentrated on
fencing, dancing, music and handwriting. There was a brief break for
'tea' which was a repeat of breakfast, and later there was a dinner which
marcin
(Marcin)
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