Plenty of Latin authors were picked over- Virgil, Caesar, Sallust, Livy,
Cicero, Horace, Cornelius Nepos - but Napoleon could never master
Latin inflections (strangely for one with such mathematical talents). In
any case, his favourite classical author was Plutarch, who wrote in Greek.
What Napoleon liked most about the ancient world was the study of its
military leaders such as Ca esar. From the story of his assassination boys
were meant to draw the moral that Caesar was a tyrant and Brutus the
champion of liberty; but Napoleon concluded that Caesar was a great man
and Brutus a traitor.
There were twenty teachers instructing six classes, but the only ones
remembered by Napoleon with any affection were Father Patrault, the
head of mathematics, and Father Dupuy, the head of French. He was
unmusical, sang out of tune, hated dancing, fencing and deportment and
was hopeless at all of them but evinced a flair for ancient history and was
brilliant at mathematics. He liked geography but his actual knowledge
was always shaky: in later life he confused the river Elbe with the Ebro
and Smolensk with Salamanca. He never mastered the rules of spelling
and always spoke French with an Italian accent, pronouncing certain
words as if they obeyed Italian rules of phonetics.
No Greek was taught at Brienne and only the most elementary Latin;
Napoleon read the classical authors in translation. He read omnivorously
if erratically and was soon recognized as one of the more able pupils. In
August and September each year the school opened its doors to the
public for exercices publics, in which the cleverest boys answered questions
put to them by the masters in the presence of Church and State
dignitaries. After 1780 Napoleon was a prize exhibit each year at these
sessions. In 1781 he was awarded a prize for mathematics by the due
d'Orleans; in 1782 he answered on mathematics and ancient history; and
in 1783 he answered mathematical problems that were as difficult as his
teachers could make them. Despite his brilliance, he never got his teeth
into higher mathematics, simply because there was no one at Brienne
with the talent to teach him.
If Napoleon's academic progress at Brienne was fair, his social and
personal formation was disastrous. Three things combined to turn him
into a misanthropic recluse when not yet in his teens: brutality, social
snobbery and racial prejudice. Brutality was visited on him by both boys
and masters. Corporal punishment was officially outlawed at Brienne as
damaging to body and soul, but this proscription was honoured more in
the breach than the observance. On one occasion Napoleon was punished
by having to eat his dinner kneeling down in the refectory, wearing coarse
brown homespun and a dunce's cap. This brought on hysteria and an
marcin
(Marcin)
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