John Ashton - English Caricature and Satire on Napoleon I. Volume I (of 2)

All our English squibs repeat the tale, and the subjoined is certainly the cleverest of them. 18 18 The Life of Napoleon, a Hudibrastic Poem in Fifteen Cantos, by Doctor Syntax (William Combe). London, 1815.

The Bonaparte family was not rich, their sole means of living being from the father’s professional exertions, and the family was very large, and many mouths to feed; in fact, they were in somewhat straitened circumstances, but not in such squalid poverty as Gillray depicts them, in the accompanying illustration, where our hero may be seen, with his brothers and sisters, gnawing the bony part of a shin of beef.

Madame Junot 19 19 Memoirs , vol. i. p. 10. says, ‘Saveria told me that Napoleon was never a pretty boy, as Joseph had been; his head always appeared too large for his body, a defect common to the Bonaparte family. When Napoleon grew up, the peculiar charm of his countenance lay in his eye, especially in the mild expression it assumed in his moments of kindness. His anger, to be sure, was frightful, and though I am no coward, I never could look at him in his fits of rage without shuddering. Though his smile was captivating, yet the expression of his mouth when disdainful, or angry, could scarcely be seen without terror. But that forehead which seemed formed to bear the crowns of a whole world; those hands, of which the most coquettish woman might have been vain, and whose white skin covered muscles of iron; in short, of all that personal beauty which distinguished Napoleon as a young man, no traces were discernible in the boy.’

Napoleon said of himself: ‘I was an obstinate and inquisitive child. I was extremely headstrong; nothing overawed me, nothing disconcerted me. I made myself formidable to the whole family. My brother Joseph was the one with whom I was oftenest embroiled; he was bitten, beaten, abused: I went to complain before he had time to recover his confusion.’

At ten years of age, through the medium of his patron, Count Marbœuf, he was sent to the military school at Brienne, which he entered on April 23, 1779. Here he was shy and reserved, and not at all liked by his schoolfellows, who twitted him with his poverty, the country whence he came, his name, and made reflections on his mother; the last particularly exasperating him. His veracious Hudibrastic historian says: —

On October 14 or 17, 1784, he left Brienne for the Ecole Militaire at Paris.

Gillray, when he drew the picture (on next page) of the abject, ragged, servile-looking Napoleon, could hardly have realised the fact that Napoleon was then over fifteen years of age, and that, having been already five years at a military school, he must necessarily have carried himself in a more soldierly manner. He stayed at the Ecole Militaire till August 1875, when he obtained his brevet of second lieutenant of Artillery in the regiment of La Fère. Madame Junot 20 20 Memoirs , vol. i. p. 33. tells an amusing anecdote of him at this period, which I must be pardoned introducing here, as it helps us to imagine his personal appearance. ‘I well recollect that on the day when he first put on his uniform, he was as vain as young men usually are on such an occasion. There was one part of his dress which had a very droll appearance – that was his boots. They were so high and wide, that his little thin legs seemed buried in their amplitude. Young people are always ready to observe anything ridiculous; and, as soon as my sister and I saw Napoleon enter the drawing-room, we burst into a loud fit of laughter. At that early age, as well as in after life, Bonaparte could not relish a joke; and when he found himself the object of merriment, he grew angry.