He saw the 10th of August, when the king was deposed. He was still in Paris when the horrible September massacres began—those massacres in which, to “save the country,” the fanatical and terrified populace resolved to put “rivers of blood” between Paris and the _émigrés_. All these excesses filled him with disgust. He began to understand that the Revolution he admired so much needed a head. In August Napoleon was restored to the army. The following June found him with his regiment in the south of France. In the interval spent in Corsica, he had abandoned Paoli and the cause of Corsican independence. His old hero had been dragged, in spite of himself, into a movement for separating the island from France. Napoleon had taken the position that the French government, whatever its excesses, was the only advocate in Europe of liberty and equality, and that Corsica would better remain with France rather than seek English aid, as it must if it revolted. But he and his party were defeated, and he with his family was obliged to flee. The Corsican period of his life was over; the French had opened. He began it as a thorough republican. The evolution of his enthusiasm for the Revolution had been natural enough. He had been a devoted believer in Rousseau’s principles. The year 1789 had struck down the abuses which galled him in French society and government. After the flight of the king in 1791 he had taken the oath: “I swear to employ the arms placed in my hands for the defence of the country, and to maintain against all her enemies, both from within and from without, the Constitution as declared by the National Assembly; to die rather than to suffer the invasion of the French territory by foreign troops, and to obey orders given in accordance with the decree of the National Assembly.” “The nation is now the paramount object,” he wrote; “my natural inclinations are now in harmony with my duties.” The efforts of the court and the _émigrés_ to overthrow the new government had increased his devotion to France. “My southern blood leaps in my veins with the rapidity of the Rhone,” he said, when the question of the preservation of the Constitution was brought up. The months spent at Paris in 1792 had only intensified his radical notions. Now that he had abandoned his country, rather than assist it to fight the Revolution, he was better prepared than ever to become a Frenchman. It seemed the only way to repair his and his family’s fortune. The condition of the Bonapartes on arriving in France after their expulsion from Corsica was abject. Their property “pillaged, sacked, and burned,” they had escaped penniless—were, in fact, refugees dependent upon French bounty. They wandered from place to place, but at last found a good friend in Monsieur Clary of Marseilles, a soapboiler, with two pretty daughters, Julie and Désirée, and Joseph and Napoleon became inmates of his house.