contemporaries but only four of them seem authentic, and even these
have often been doctored or suffused with the 'wisdom' of retrospection.
Hence the surfeit of apocrypha from these years -the plaintive pleas
from Napoleon to his parents for pocket-money, the alleged visit to
Brittany, etc. Napoleon himself, in his St Helena memoirs, doubtless
exaggerated the misery at school, the violence and the loneliness. Yet all
the evidence dovetails to underline the inescapable conclusion that he did
not fit in, did not make friends easily, was unpopular and a lone wolf.
Two of the best authenticated stories show him in the two moods he
habitually demonstrated at Brienne: either a reserved, meditative loner
who would turn to violence if provoked; or an aggressive gang-leader.
As part of the ethos of 'robust bodies, enlightened minds, honest
hearts' so falteringly applied by the Berton brothers, all students were
encouraged to take up outdoor recreations. Napoleon and three of his
schoolmates opted for gardening, but Napoleon quickly bribed the others
to give up their rights in the patch of garden and then enclosed his plot
with a 'palisade'. He liked to retire inside this redoubt to be alone, private
and au dessus de Ia melee, to work on an algebraic problem or read his
favourite books - Plutarch, Macpherson's Ossian and Marshal Saxe on
military campaigning. On the feast of St Louis the other boys let off
fireworks, but Napoleon, as a pointed demonstration of his Corsican
patriotism, held aloof. One of the fireworks exploded a fresh box of
firecrackers, at which the boys panicked and stampeded through the
gardens, trampling down Napoleon's stockade. In a fury he emerged with
a spade and laid about him, as a retaliation for which he was later
ambushed and beaten up. His peers took the line that Napoleon should
have been able to see that the whole affair was a genuine accident and
been rational about it. But to Napoleon, obsessed as he was with notions
of defending Corsica against the French invader, the incident was a
microcosm of all the events that caused him greatest grief.
The most famous event featuring Napoleon at Brienne comes from late
in his years at the school, in the winter of 1783-84. There had been heavy
snowfall and Napoleon, now fourteen, suggested to his bored fellow
pupils that they build a snow fortress in the courtyard, and then divide
into two groups, besiegers and besieged, for a massive snowfight. The
idea was at first a huge success, with Napoleon commanding both sides,
but things took an ugly turn when the boys began to cover large stones in
an outer casing of snow; serious wounds were sustained as a result.
Needless to say, this incident was always cited later as prefiguring
Napoleon's military genius. A better index of his Promethean ambitions
is his well-authenticated remark to the Inspector-General M. de Keralio
marcin
(Marcin)
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