The War of Wars by Robert Harvey

nationality and olive skin, an insult felt all the more strongly because he regarded himself as a high aristocrat in a way only a provincial from a tiny sea-port can.
    Among the French aristocrats’ sons who were his fellow pupils he was almost beneath contempt. This he reciprocated, referring to aristocrats as ‘imbeciles’, ‘asses’ and ‘the curse of the nation’. He considered himself high born, with adequate reason, and yet was not treated as part of them – an explosive combination. Tough, surly and from an island background where slights were met by a vendetta and even death, he had reason enough for harbouring resentment and deep ambition. Being able and having the luck to be educated at France’s most prestigious military academy, he had the perfect means to prove himself: by becoming a leader in the very nation that had annexed his homeland: that would be a triumph of vendetta indeed.
    However, none of this early background explains either his rise to power or later actions: there must have been hundreds of officers in the French army with similarly complex lives and motives. He had been promoted, partly through luck, partly through ability, so that he had the potential to reach the top of French society; he had no reason to feel ungrateful to the French.
    With the death of his father, he was forced to take lodgings in a noisy first floor café, next door to a billiard room and send back most of his pay to his mother, who had now lost not just a husband but a patron, the randy Comte de Marbeuf, who had married an eighteen-year-old. Yet countless other young officers were in similar financial straits. There was not much that marked out Napoleon from his peers –except his intelligence and overweening curiosity. He was not even especially ambitious at that stage: he wanted to become a writer.
    He was certainly unhappy and depressed during these penurious times. He wrote miserably:
    Life is a burden to me because I feel no pleasure and because everything is affliction to me. It is a burden to me because the men with whom I have to live, and will probably always live, have ways as different from mine as the light of the moon from that of the sun. I cannot then pursue the only manner of living which could enable me to put up with existence, whence follows a disgust for everything.
    Later the same pessimism surfaced in a letter to his hero, Paoli:
    As the nation was perishing I was born. Thirty thousand Frenchmen were vomited on to our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in waves of blood. Such was the odious sight which was the first to strike me. From my birth, my cradle was surrounded by the cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed and tears of despair. You left our island and with you went all hope of happiness. Slavery was the price of our submission. Crushed by the triple yoke of the soldier, the law-maker and the tax inspector, our compatriots live despised.
    This was remarkable as an expression of his open hatred for the French. He had acquired this when, after Marbeuf’s death, Corsica was ruled by spendthrift bureaucrats who had cut back payments to his mother for agricultural improvements. During this period, he was given leave to visit his home, where he was shocked to find his mother virtually unaided, and he soon procured a servant for her, Severia, who remained with her for forty years. Joseph, who was now studying law in Pisa, returned and the two old playground antagonists got on famously. Napoleon travelled to Paris to lobby for a financial grant, which failed. But at the age of eighteen he slept with a girl for the first time in his life, a Breton prostitute.
    He returned to his regiment, which was now stationed at Auxonne. There he had a very relaxed work regime, needing to attend paradesjust once a week, and made up for it by reading and writing. He was a furious worker, rising at 4 am and going to bed at 10 p.m., which brought on physical exhaustion. He filled no fewer than