Withal, he is no spoiled child. Poverty, ill-luck, the
shifts of impecunious shabby-gentility, repeated failure as a
would-be author, humiliation as a rebuffed time server, reproof
and punishment as an incompetent and dishonest officer, an escape
from dismissal from the service so narrow that if the emigration
of the nobles had not raised the value of even the most rascally
lieutenant to the famine price of a general he would have been
swept contemptuously from the army: these trials have ground the
conceit out of him, and forced him to be self-sufficient and to
understand that to such men as he is the world will give nothing
that he cannot take from it by force. In this the world is not
free from cowardice and folly; for Napoleon, as a merciless
cannonader of political rubbish, is making himself useful.
indeed, it is even now impossible to live in England without
sometimes feeling how much that country lost in not being
conquered by him as well as by Julius Caesar.
However, on this May afternoon in 1796, it is early days with
him. He is only 26, and has but recently become a general, partly
by using his wife to seduce the Directory (then governing France)
partly by the scarcity of officers caused by the emigration as
aforesaid; partly by his faculty of knowing a country, with all
its roads, rivers, hills and valleys, as he knows the palm of his
hand; and largely by that new faith of his in the efficacy of
firing cannons at people.
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