life was too expensive and delicate for "poor gentlemen," and could not
prepare them either for returning to their "modest homes," or for the
hardships of the camp. He proposed that, instead of a regular dinner of
two courses daily, the students should have ammunition bread, and
soldiers' rations, and that they should be compelled to mend and clean
their own stockings and shoes. This memorial is said to have done him no
service at the military school.

He had just completed his sixteenth year when (in August, 1785,) after
being examined by the great Laplace, he obtained his first commission as
second lieutenant in the artillery regiment _La Fere_. His corps was at
Valance when he joined it; and he mingled, more largely than might have
been expected from his previous habits, in the cultivated society of the
place. His personal advantages were considerable; the outline of the
countenance classically beautiful; the eye deep-set and dazzlingly
brilliant; the figure short, but slim, active, and perfectly knit.
Courtly grace and refinement of manners he never attained, nor perhaps
coveted; but he early learned the art, not difficult probably to any
person possessed of such genius and such accomplishments, of rendering
himself eminently agreeable wherever it suited his purpose or
inclination to be so.

On the 27th February in this year his father died of a cancer in the
stomach, aged forty-five; the same disease which was destined, at a
somewhat later period of life, to prove fatal to himself.

While at Valance Buonaparte competed anonymously for a prize offered by
the Academy of Lyons for the best answer to Raynal's Question: "What are
the principles and institutions by the application of which mankind can
be raised to the highest happiness?" He gained the prize: what were the