VII.
NAPOLEON'S FAMILY.
Napoleon's father, Charles Bonaparte, was weak and even frivolous, "too fond of pleasure to care about his children," or his affairs; he died at thirty-nine of cancer of the stomach—"which seems to be the only bequest he made to his son, Napoleon." His mother was altogether of a different type—a type, too, thoroughly Italian. "Serious, authoritative," she was "the real head of the family." She was, said Napoleon, "hard in her affections; she punished and rewarded without distinction good or bad; she made us all feel it."
On becoming head of the household "she was too parsimonious—even ridiculously so. This was due to excess of foresight on her part; she had known want, and her terrible sufferings were never out of her mind. . . . In other respects this woman, from whom it would have been difficult to extract five francs, would have given up everything to secure my return from Elba, and after Waterloo she offered me all she possessed to retrieve my fortunes."
Other accounts of her agree in saying that she was "unboundedly avaricious;" that she had "no knowledge whatever of the usages of society;" that she was very "ignorant, not alone of 'French' literature but of her own." "The character of the son," says Stendhal, "is to be explained by the
