Fesch, who was now a frocked priest, and had hastened to his bedside to offer the last consolations of the Church to a dying man. Failure as he had been, he had nevertheless been so far the support of his family in their hopes of advancement. Sycophant as he had become, they recognized his untiring energy in their behalf, and sincerely mourned for him. He had left them penniless and in debt, but he had died in their service. Napoleon's letter to his mother is dignified and affectionate, referring in a becoming spirit to the support her children owed her. As if to show what a thorough child he still was, the dreary little note closes with an odd postscript giving the irrelevant news of the birth, two days earlier, of a royal prince, the duke of Normandy!

Some time before, General Marbeuf had married, and the pecuniary supplies to his boy friend seem after that event to have stopped. Mme. de Buonaparte was left with four infant children, the youngest, Jerome, but three months old. Their great-uncle, Lucien, the archdeacon, was kind, and Joseph, abandoning all his ambitions, returned to be, if possible, the support of the family. Napoleon's poverty was therefore no longer relative or imaginary, but real and hard. Drawing more closely than ever within himself, he became a still more ardent reader and student, devoting himself with an industry akin to passion to the works of Rousseau, the poison of whose political doctrines instilled itself with fiery and grateful stings into the thin, cold blood of the unhappy cadet.

Whether to alleviate as soon as possible the miseries of his destitution, or, as has been charged, to be rid of their querulous and exasperating inmate, the authorities of the military

school shortened his stay to the utmost of their ability, and admitted Buonaparte to examination in August, 1785, less than a year from his admission. He passed with no distinction, being forty-second in rank, but above his room-mate, who was fifty-sixth. His appointment, therefore, was due to an entire al sence of rivalry, the young nobility having no predilection for the arduous duties of artillery service. He was eligible merely because he had passed the legal age, and had given evidence of sufficient acquisitions. In his certificate he was characterized as reserved and stadious, preferring study to any kind of amusement, delighting in good authors, diligent in the abstract sciences, caring little for the others, thoroughly trained in mathematics and geography; silent, fond of solitude, capricious, haughty, extremely inclined to egotism, speak ing little, energetic in his replies, prompt and severe in repartee; having much self-esteem amour-propre); ambitious and aspiring to any height: "the youth is worthy of protection."

The two room-mates had both asked for an appointment in a regiment stationed at Valence, known by the style of La Fère. Des Mazis had a brother in it; the ardent young Corsican would be nearer his native land, and might, perhaps, be detached for service in his home. They were both nominated on September 1, but the appointment was not made until the close of October. Lieutenant de Buonaparte was reduced to utter penury by the long delay. It was at his comrade's expense, and in his company, that he journeyed to Valence. Their little store of cash was exhausted at Lyons, and they measured the long leagues thence to their destination on foot.

The growth of absolutism in Europe had been largely due to the employment by the kings of standing armies, and the consequent alliance between the crown, which was the paymaster, and the people, who furnished the soldiery. There was constant conflict between the crown and the nobility concerning privilege, constant friction between the nobility and the people in the survivals of feudal relation. This sturdy and wholesome contention among the three estates ended at last in the victory of the king. In time, therefore, the army became no longer a mere support to the monarchy, but a portion of its moral organism, sharing its virtues and its vices, its weakness and its strength, reflecting, as in a mirror, the true condition of the state so far as it was personified in the king. The French army, in the year 1785, was in a sorry plight. With the consolidation of classes in an old monarchical society, it had come to pass that, under the prevailing voluntary system, none but men of the lowest social stratum would enlist. Barracks and camps became the schools of vice. "Is there," exclaimed one who at a later day was active in the work of army reform-"is there a father who does not shudder when abandoning his son, not to the chances of war, but to the associations of a crowd of scoundrels a thousand times more dangerous?" We have already had a glimpse at the character of the officers. Their first thought was position and pleasure, duty and the practice of their profession being considerations of almost vanishing importance. Things were quite as bad in the central administration. Neither the organization, nor the equipment, nor the commissariat, was in condition to insure accuracy or promptness in the working of the machine. The regiment of La Fère was but a sample of the whole. "Dancing three times a week," says the advertisement for recruits," rackets twice, and the rest of the time skittles, prisoner's base, and drill. Pleasures reign, every man has the highest pay, and all are well treated." Buonaparte's pay was eleven hundred and twenty livres a year; his

necessary expenses for board and lodging were seven hundred and twenty, leaving less than thirty-five livres (or about seven dollars) a month for clothes and pocket-money. Fifteen years as lieutenant, fifteen as captain, and, for the rest of his life, half pay with a decoration--such was the summary of the prospect before the ordinary commonplace officer in a like situation. During the first months of his garrison service Buonaparte threw off entirely the darkness and reserve of his character, taking a full draught from the brimming cup of pleasure. The novelty, the absence of restraint, the comparative emancipation from the arrogance and slights he had hitherto been subject to, good news from the family in Corsica, whose hopes as to the inheritance were once more highall these elements combined to intoxicate for a time the boy of sixteen. The strongest will cannot forever repress the exuberance of budding manhood. There were balls, and with them the first experience of women's society. The young lieutenant even took dancing-lessons. Moreover, in the drawing-rooms of the Abbé Saint-Ruf and his friends, for the first time he saw the manners and heard the talk of refined society-provincial, to be sure, but of the genuine sort. It was to the special favor of Monseigneur de Marbeuf, the bishop of Autun, that he owed his warm reception. The acquaintances there made were with persons of local consequence, who in later years reaped a rich harvest for their condescension to the young stranger. Of his fellow-officers he saw but little, not because they were distant, but because he had no genius for good-fellowship, and the habit of indifference to his comrades had grown strong upon him.

The period of pleasure was not long. It is impossible to judge whether the little self-indulgence was a weak relapse from an iron purpose or part of a definite plan. The former is more likely, so abrupt and apparently conscience-stricken was the return to labor. Even during the months from November to April he had not entirely deserted his favorite stud

ies, and again Rousseau had been their companion and guide. But in the spring it was the Abbé Raynal of whom he became a devotee. At the first blush it seems as if Buonaparte's studies were irregular and haphazard. It is customary to attribute slender powers of observation and undefined purposes to childhood and youth. The opinion may be correct in the main, and would, for the matter of that, be true as regards the great mass of adults. But the more we know of psychology through autotobiographies the more certain it appears that many a great life-plan has been formed before ten, and carried through with unbending rigor to the end. Whether Buonaparte consciously ordered the course of his study and reading or not, there is unity in it from first to last.

After the first rude beginnings there were two nearly parallel lines in his work. The first was the acquisition of what was essential to the practice of a profession-nothing more. No one could be a soldier in either army or navy without a practical knowledge of history and geography, for the earth and its inhabitants are in a special sense the scene of military activity. Nor can towns be fortified, nor camps intrenched, nor any of the manifold duties of the general in the field be performed without the science of quantity and numbers. Just these things, and just so far as they were practical, the dark, ambitious boy was willing to learn. For spelling, grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy he had no care; neither he nor his sister Elise, the two strong natures of the family, could ever speak, write, or spell any language with elegance and ease. Among the private papers of his youth there is but one mathematical study of any importance; the rest are either trivial, or have some practical bearing on the problems of gunnery. When at Brienne his patron had certified that he cared nothing for accomplishments and had none.

This was the case to the end. But there was another branch of knowledge equally practical, but necessary to so few that it was neither taught nor learned in the schools—the art of politics.

ENGRAVED BY C. W. CHADWICK.

NANNA AND ANNETTA.

I.

UBIACO lies beyond Tivoli, southeast from Rome, at the upper end of a wild gorge in the Samnite mountains. It is an archbishopric, and gives a title to a cardinal, which alone would make it a town of importance. It shares with Monte Cassino the honor of having been chosen by Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica, his

sister, as the site of a monastery and a convent; and in a cell in the rock a portrait of the holy man is still well preserved, which is believed, not without reason, to have been painted from life, although Saint Benedict died early in the fifth century. The town itself rises abruptly to a great height upon a mass of rock, almost conical in shape, crowned by a cardinal's palace, and surrounded on three sides by rugged mountains. On the fourth it looks down the rapidly widening valley in the direction of Vicovaro, near which the Licenza runs into the Anio, in the neighborhood of Horace's farm. It is a very ancient town, and in its general appearance it does not differ very much from many similar ones among the Italian mountains; but its position is exceptionally good, and its importance has been stamped upon it by the hands of those who have thought it worth holding since the days of ancient Rome. Of late it has, of course, acquired a certain modernness of aspect; it has planted acacia-trees in its little piazza, and it has a gorgeously arrayed municipal band. But from a little distance one neither hears the band nor sees the trees; the grim medieval fortifications frown upon the valley, and the time-stained dwellings, great and small, rise in rugged irregularity against the lighter brown of the rocky background and the green of scattered olive-groves and chestnuts. Those features, at least, have not changed, and show no disposition to change during generations to

come.

In the year 1844 modern civilization had not yet set in, and Subiaco was within what it still appears to be from without, a somewhat gloomy stronghold of the middle ages, rearing its battlements and towers in a shadowy gorge, above a mountain torrent, inhabited by primitive and passionate people, dominated by ecclesiastical institutions; and, though distinctly Roman, a couple of hundred years behind Rome itself in all matters ethic and esthetic. It was still the scene of the Santacroce murder, which really decided Beatrice Cenci's fate; it was still the gathering-place of highwaymen and outlaws, whose activity found an admirable field through all the region of hill and plain between. the Samnite range and the sea; while the almost inaccessible fortresses of the higher mountains, toward Trevi and the Serra di Sant' Antonio,

offered a safe refuge from the half-hearted pursuit of Pope Gregory's lazy soldiers.

Something of what one may call the life-anddeath earnestness of earlier times, when passion was motive, and prejudice was law, survived at that time and even much later; the ferocity of practical love and hatred dominated the theory and practice of justice in the public life of the smaller towns, while the patriarchal system subjected the family in almost absolute servitude to its head.

There was nothing very surprising in the fact that the head of the house of Braccio should

have obliged one of his daughters to take the veil in the convent of Carmelite nuns, just within the gate of Subiaco, as his sister had taken it many years earlier. Indeed, it was customary in the family of the Princes of Gerano that one of the women should be a Carmelite, and it was a tradition not unattended with worldly advantages to the sisterhood, that the Braccio nun, whenever there was one, should be the abbess of that particular convent.

Maria Teresa Braccio had therefore yielded, though very unwillingly, to her father's insistence, and, having passed through her noviti

ate, had finally taken the veil as a Carmelite of Subiaco in the year 1841, on the distinct understanding that when her aunt died she was to be abbess in the older lady's stead. The abbess herself was, indeed, in excellent health and not yet fifty years old, so that Maria Teresain religion Maria Addolorata might have a long time to wait before she was promoted to an honor which she regarded as hereditary; but the prospect of such promotion was almost her only compensation for all she had left behind her, and she lived upon it, and concentrated her character upon it, and practised the part she was to play when she was quite sure that she was not observed.

Nature had not made her for a recluse, least of all for a nun of such a rigid order as the Carmelites. The short taste of a brilliant social hfe which she had been allowed to enjoy, in accordance with an ancient tradition, before finally taking the veil, had shown her clearly enough the value of what she was to abandon, and at the same time had altogether confirmed her father in his decision. Compared with the freedom of the present day, the restrictions imposed upon a young girl in the Roman society of those times were, of course, tyrannical in the extreme, and the average modern young lady would almost as willingly go into a convent as submit to them. But Maria Teresa had received an impression which nothing could efface. Her intuitive nature had divined the possible semi-emancipation of marriage, and her temperament had felt in a certain degree the extremes of joyous exaltation and of that entrancing sadness which is love's premonition, and which tells maidens what love is before they know him, by making them conscious of the breadth and depth of his yet vacant dwelling.

She had learned in that brief time that she was beautiful, and she had felt that she could love, and that she should be loved in return. She had seen the world as a princess, and had felt it as a woman, and she had understood all that she must give up in taking the veil. But she had been offered no choice, and, though she had contemplated opposition, she had not dared to revolt. Being absolutely in the power of her parents, so far as she was aware, she had accepted the fatality of their will, and bent her fair head to be shorn of its glory, and her broad fr head to be covered forever from the gaze of men. And having submitted, she had gone through it all bravely and proudly, as perhaps she would have gone through other things, even to death itself, being a daughter of an of race, accustomed to deify honor and to make divinities of its traditions. For the rest of her natural life she was to live on the memories of one short, magnificent year, forever to VOL. XLIX.-5-6.

be contented with the grim rigidity of conventual life in an ancient cloister surrounded by gloomy mountains. She was to be a veiled shadow among veiled shades, a priestess of sorrow among sad virgins; and though, if she lived long enough, she was to be the chief of them and their ruler, her very superiority could only make her desolation more complete, until her own shadow, like the others, should be gathered into eternal darkness.

Sister Maria Addolorata had certain privileges for which her companions would have given much, but which were traditionally the right of such ladies of the Braccio family as took the veil. For instance, she had a cell which, though not larger than the other cells, was better situated, for it had a little balcony looking over the convent garden, and high enough to afford a view of the distant valley, and of the hills which bounded it, beyond the garden wall. It was entered by the last door in the corridor within, and was near the abbess's apartment, which was entered from the corridor, through a small antechamber, which also gave access to the vast linen-presses. The balcony, too, had a little staircase leading down into the garden. It had always been the custom to carry the linen to and from the laundry through Maria Addolorata's cell, and through a postern-gate in the garden wall, the washing being done in the town. By this plan was avoided the annoyance of carrying the huge baskets through the whole length of the convent, to and from the main entrance, which was also much farther removed from the house of Sora Nanna, the chief laundress. Moreover, Maria Addolorata had charge of all the convent linen, and the employment thus afforded her was an undoubted privilege in itself, for occupation of any kind not devotional was excessively scarce in such existence.

In the eyes of the other nuns the constant society of the abbess herself was also a privilege, and one not by any means to be despised. After all, the abbess and her niece were nearly related; they could talk of the affairs of their family, and the abbess doubtless received many letters from Rome containing all the interesting news of the day, and all the social gossip — perfectly innocent, of course — which was the chronicle of Roman life. These were valuable compensations, and the nuns envied them. The abbess, too, saw her brother, the archbishop and titular cardinal of Subiaco, when the princely prelate came out from Rome for the coolness of the mountains in August and September; and his conversation was said to be not only edifying, but fascinating. The cardinal was a very good man, like many of the Braccio family, but he was also a man of the world, who had been sent upon foreign missions of importance,