mind. - His youthful sentiments regarding Corsica and France. -
Indications found in his early compositions and in his style. -
Current monarchical or democratic ideas have no hold on him. - His
impressions of the 20th of June and 10th of August after the 31st of
May. - His associations with Robespierre and Barras without
committing himself. - His sentiments and the side he takes Vendémiaire
13th. - The great Condottière. - His character and conduct in Italy.
- Description of him morally and physically in 1798. - The early and
sudden ascendancy which he exerts. Analogous in spirit and character
to his Italian ancestors of the XVth century.

Disproportionate in all things, but, stranger still, he is not only
out of the common run, but there is no standard of measurement for
him; through his temperament, instincts, faculties, imagination,
passions, and moral constitution he seems cast in a special mould,
composed of another metal than that which enters into the composition
of his fellows and contemporaries. Evidently he is not a Frenchman,
nor a man of the eighteenth century; he belongs to another race and
another epoch.[3] We detect in him, at the first glance, the
foreigner, the Italian,[4] and something more, apart and beyond these,
surpassing all similitude or analogy.-Italian he was through blood and
lineage; first, through his paternal family, which is Tuscan,[5] and
which we can follow down from the twelfth century, at Florence, then
at San Miniato ; next at Sarzana, a small, backward, remote town in
the state of Genoa, where, from father to son, it vegetates obscurely
in provincial isolation, through a long line of notaries and municipal
syndics. "My origin," says Napoleon himself,[6] " has made all
Italians regard me as a compatriot. . . . When the question of the
marriage of my sister Pauline with Prince Borghése came up there was
but one voice in Rome and in Tuscany, in that family, and with all its