was proud, and was most careful that nobody should perceive this . . . . I could neither laugh nor amuse myself like the others." Bonaparte the schoolboy was out of touch with his comrades, and he was not popular.
It will be seen from this passage that Napoleon was made early acquainted with those traits of human nature which gave him his permanently and instinctively low opinion of it, and which helped to make him regard life as simply a personal struggle, where you destroy or are destroyed. Napoleon was five years and a half in this school; and, curiously enough, though he must really have been unhappy, he saw it afterwards through the gauze of retrospect as being very different. One day, when he was First Consul, and was walking with Bourrienne―the one schoolfellow whom he loved in Brienne―in the gardens of Malmaison, the residence of his office, he heard the chiming of bells, which always had a remarkable effect upon him; he stopped, listened delightedly, and said in a broken voice: "That reminds me of my first years at Brienne; I was happy then." M. Levy is able to prove that the tenderness of these recollections showed itself in another way also. Napoleon befriended nearly everybody who was ever connected with the school unless they had treated him badly. Napoleon was one of the worst writers of his time. His script was undecipherable, even to himself; sometimes he found it hard to write
