Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XI

Buonaparte's connection with his old regiment was soon to be broken. He joined it on February thirteenth; he left it on June fourteenth. With these four months his total service was five years and nine months; but he had been absent, with or without leave, something more than half the time! His old friends in Auxonne were few in number, if indeed there were any at all. No doubt his fellow-officers were tired of performing the absentee's duties, and of good-fellowship there could be in any case but little, with such difference of taste, politics, and fortune as there was between him and them. However, he made a few new friends; but it was in the main the old solitary life which he resumed. His own room was in a cheap lodging-house, and, according to the testimony of a visitor, furnished with a wretched uncurtained couch, a table, and two chairs. Louis slept on a pallet in a closet near by. All pleasures but those of hope were utterly banished from those plucky lives, while they studied in preparation for the examination which might admit the younger to his brother's corps. The elder pinched and scraped to pay the younger's board; himself, according to a probable but rather untrustworthy account, brushing his own clothes that they might last longer, and supping often on dry bread. His only place of resort was the political club. One single pleasure he allowed himself—the occasional purchase of some long-coveted volume from the shelves of a town bookseller.[24]