"To the age of eighteen months, the Prince Imperial did nothing remarkable; but, dating from that moment, he became a veritable prodigy. Along with his first pair of trousers, his father ordered two dozen witticisms of the editors of _Figaro_. These sallies at once went the rounds of the domestic press, and the Prince Imperial had not reached his sixth year when he passed, in the rural districts, for having all the wit which his mother lacked. Thus, in full _Figaro_, appeared one morning a crayon drawing attributed to the Prince Imperial, at the age when as yet he only executed in _sepia_ upon the flaps of his shirt. "This marvel of precocity astonished all men who had need of a sub-prefectship or a place in the tobacco excise; and this to such a point that they were not in the least surprised when, during the Exhibition of 1867, a reporter prepared his left button-hole to receive the recompense due to the brave by printing--in the self-same _Figaro_, by heavens!--that the little prince, then eleven years of age, had discussed with engineers of experience the strong and weak points of all the wheel work in the grand hall of machinery. "The years which followed were for the young phenomenon only a succession of triumphs of the same calibre, until the day when his father declared that, in order to complete his imperial education, nothing was wanting to him but to learn to ride the velocipede. "It need not be said that he learned this noble art, like all the others, by just blowing upon it. "Meanwhile, Eugene-Napoleon had achieved various grades in the army. Named Corporal in the Grenadiers of the Guard at the age of twenty-two months, one evening when he had not cried for being put to bed at eight o'clock, he had been made successively pioneer, sergeant, sergeant-major, and adjutant of the same corps. When he made some difficulties about swallowing his iodide of potassium in the morning, they promised him promotion, and that encouraged him. From glass to glass, he won the epaulet of sub-lieutenant; and at the moment when the war with Prussia broke out he had just deserved the epaulet of lieutenant by letting them give him, without crying, an injection with salt, which inspired him with profound horror. "At the very beginning of the war, his father took him to the Prussian frontier, in order to make him pass by his side under triumphal arches into Berlin, which the army _five times ready_ of Marshal Leboeuf was to enter within four days at the very latest. "At the combat of Sarrebruck, that brilliant military pantomime which the Emperor caused to be performed under the guise of a parade, the Prince Imperial became the admiration of Europe by picking up on the field of battle '_a bullet which had fallen near him_,' said the dispatch of Napoleon to Eugénie. '_From the pocket of a mischievous staff officer_,' history will add.