contents of his Essay we know not. Talleyrand, long afterwards, obtained
the manuscript, and, thinking to please his sovereign, brought it to
him. He threw his eye over two or three pages, and tossed it into the
fire. The treatise of the Lieutenant probably abounded in opinions which
the Emperor had found it convenient to forget.

Even at Brienne his political feelings had been determined. At Valance
he found the officers of his regiment divided, as all the world then
was, into two parties; the lovers of the French Monarchy, and those who
desired its overthrow. He sided openly with the latter. "Had I been a
general," said Napoleon in the evening of his life, "I might have
adhered to the king: being a subaltern, I joined the patriots."

In the beginning of 1792 he became captain of artillery (_unattached;_)
and, happening to be in Paris, witnessed the lamentable scenes of the
20th of June, when the revolutionary mob stormed the Tuileries, and the
king and his family, after undergoing innumerable insults and
degradations, with the utmost difficulty preserved their lives. He
followed the crowd into the garden before the palace; and when Louis
XVI. appeared on a balcony with the red cap on his head, could no longer
suppress his contempt and indignation. "Poor driveller!" said Napoleon,
loud enough to be heard by those near him, "how could he suffer this
rabble to enter? If he had swept away five or six hundred with his
cannon, the rest would be running yet." He was also a witness of the
still more terrible 10th of August, when, the palace being once more
invested, the National Guard assigned for its defence took part with the
assailants; the royal family were obliged to take refuge in the National
Assembly, and the brave Swiss Guards were massacred almost to a man in
the courts of the Tuileries. Buonaparte was a firm friend to the
Assembly, to the charge of a party of which, at least, these excesses