"Confounded boors, interrupting a gentleman at his correspondence!"said Bonaparte, with an angry glance at the hostile gunners. "I'll have to dictate that message all over again.""Yes, general," returned Junot, quickly, "but you needn't mind that.
There will be no extra charge. It's really my fault. I should have brought an umbrella.""You are a noble fellow," said Napoleon, grasping his hand and squeezing it warmly. "In the heyday of my prosperity, if my prosperity ever goes a-haying, I shall remember you. Your name?""Junot, General," was the reply.
Bonaparte frowned. "Ha! ha!" he laughed, acridly. "You jest, eh?
Well, Junot, when I am Jupiter I'll reward you."Later on, discovering his error, Bonaparte made a memorandum concerning Junot, which was the first link in the chain which ultimately bound the stenographer to fame as a marshal of France.
There have been various other versions of this anecdote, but this is the only correct one, and is now published for the first time on the authority of M. le Comte de B--, whose grandfather was the bass drummer upon whose drum Junot was writing the now famous letter, and who was afterwards ennobled by Napoleon for his services in Egypt, where, one dark, drizzly night, he frightened away from Bonaparte's tent a fierce band of hungry lions by pounding vigorously upon his instrument.
About this time Napoleon, who had been spelling his name in various ways, and particularly with a "u," as Buonaparte, decided to settle finally upon one form of designation.
"People are beginning to bother the life out of me with requests for my autograph," he said to Bourrienne, "and it is just as well that Ishould settle on one. If I don't, they'll want me to write out a complete set of them, and I haven't time to do that.""Buonaparte is a good-looking name," suggested Bourrienne. "It is better than Bona Parte, as you sometimes call yourself. If you settle on Bona Parte, you'd have really three names; and as you don't write society verse for the comic papers, what's the use? Newspaper reporters will refer to you as Napoleon B. Parte or N. Bona Parte, and the public hates a man who parts his name in the middle. Parte is a good name in its way, but it's too short and abrupt. Few men with short, sharp, decisive names like that ever make their mark.
Let it be Buonaparte, which is sort of high-sounding--it makes a mouthful, as it were.""If I drop the 'u' the autograph will be shorter, and I'll gain time writing it," said Napoleon. "It shall be Bonaparte without 'u.'""Humph!" ejaculated Bourrienne. "Bonaparte without me! I like that.
Might as well talk of Dr. Johnson without Boswell."Bonaparte now went to Nice as chief of batallion in the army of Italy; but having incurred the displeasure of a suspicious home government, he was shortly superseded, and lived in retirement with his family at Marseilles for a brief time. Here he fell in love again, and would have married Mademoiselle Clery, whom he afterwards made Queen of Sweden, had he not been so wretchedly poor.
"This, my dear," he said, sadly, to Mademoiselle Clery, "is the beastly part of being the original ancestor of a family instead of a descendant. I've got to make the fortune which will enrich posterity, while I'd infinitely prefer having a rich uncle somewhere who'd have the kindness to die and leave me a million. There's Joseph--lucky man. He's gone and got married. He can afford it. He has me to fall back on, but I--I haven't anybody to fall back on, and so, for the second time in my life, must give up the only girl I ever loved."With these words Napoleon left Mademoiselle Clery, and returned to Paris in search of employment.
"If there's nothing else to do, I can disguise myself as a Chinaman and get employment in Madame Sans Gene's laundry," he said. "There's no disgrace in washing, and in that way I may be able to provide myself with decent linen, anyhow. Then I shall belong to the laundered aristocracy, as the English have it."But greater things than this awaited Napoleon at Paris. Falling in with Barras, a member of the Convention which ruled France at this time, he learned that the feeling for the restoration of the monarchy was daily growing stronger, and that the royalists of Paris were a great menace to the Convention.