awkwardness and inexperience, but also through excess of ardor and of
heat;[20] his jerking, eruptive thought, overcharged with passion,
indicates the depth and temperature of its source. Already, at the
Academy, the professor of belles-lettres[21] notes down that "in the
strange and incorrect grandeur of his amplifications he seems to see
granite fused in a volcano." However original in mind and in
sensibility, ill-adapted as he is to the society around him, different
from his comrades, it is clear beforehand that the current ideas which
take such hold on them will obtain no hold on him.

Of the two dominant and opposite ideas which clash with each other, it
might be supposed that he would lean either to one or to the other,
although accepting neither. - Pensioner of the king, who supported
him at Brienne, and afterwards in the Military Academy; who also
supported his sister at Saint-Cyr; who, for twenty years, is the
benefactor of his family; to whom, at this very time, he addresses
entreating or grateful letters over his mother's signature - he does
not regard him as his born general; it does not enter his mind to take
sides and draw his sword in his patron's behalf;' in vain is he a
gentleman, to whom, d'Hozier has certified; reared in a school of
noble cadets, he has no noble or monarchical traditions.[22] - Poor
and tormented by ambition, a reader of Rousseau, patronized by Raynal,
and tacking together sentences of philosophic fustian about equality,
if he speaks the jargon of the day, it is without any belief in it.
The phrases in vogue form a decent, academical drapery for his ideas,
or serve him as a red cap for the club; he is not bewildered by
democratic illusions, and entertains no other feeling than disgust for
the revolution and the sovereignty of the populace. - At Paris, in
April,1792, when the struggle between the monarchists and the
revolutionaries is at its height, he tries to find "some successful