attending classes on mathematics, fortification, chemistry and physics.
There was plenty of free time. From the copious notes Napoleon kept we
know a great deal about how he spent his time: climbing Mont Roche
Colombe, skating, visiting the towns of Romans and Tournon. He
records that Valence, a town of s,ooo inhabitants, then chiefly notable for
its citadel and a plethora of abbeys and priories, had more than its fair
share of pretty women. Girls begin to be mentioned: on 4 December
1785, at a fiesta, he danced with a certain Mlle Mion-Desplaces. He was
friendly with a Madame Gregoire de Colobier and her daughter Caroline,
though the episode of eating cherries in the countryside with Caroline
sounds suspiciously like a Rousseauesque fantasy (Rousseau did likewise
with Mlle Galley).
Napoleon's principal problem was money. He had an income of r,rzo
livres a year, made up of a basic salary of 8oo livres, plus zoo livres royal
bounty and rzo livres lodging allowance. But because Carlo had died
virtually penniless and Letizia had lost the protection of Marbeuf,
Napoleon had to remit most of his earnings to Corsica to help his
impoverished family; Letizia had a total of r ,zoo livres a year on which to
keep herself and the younger children. Somehow or other she inveigled
money for extras out of the notorious skinflint Archdeacon Luciano, who
was the family miser. Napoleon therefore had to make do with very basic
lodgings. He found a noisy room on the first floor of the Cafe Cercle, at
the corner of the Grand-Rue and the rue du Croissant, where the
landlady was a fifty-year-old spinster, Mlle Bou, who washed and looked
after his clothes; the room and services cost just over eight livres. He took
his meals in a cheap cafe named the Three Pigeons in rue Perollerie.
At Valence Napoleon launched himself on a career as a would-be
writer. He penned a refutation of a book attacking his hero Rousseau. He
wrote a story called The Prophetic Mask about an Arab prophet who is
defeated after a string of victories and commits suicide along with all his
followers. Apart from underlining Napoleon's continuing fascination with
the world of the Middle East, the tale and the sixteen-year-old
lieutenant's notebooks testify eloquently at this time to a morbid
preoccupation with suicide. How seriously should we take this? Partly it
seems a fashionable Romantic pose, for Goethe's Werther, with his tired
of-life melancholia, was a role model for educated young men of the time.
But part of Napoleon's reflections on suicide do suggest a genuine
pessimism about the world and the beginnings of a depressive illness. He
wrote:
Always alone in the midst of men, I return to dream with myself and