The Bonaparte family was not rich, their sole means of living being from the father’s professional exertions, and the family was very large, and many mouths to feed; in fact, they were in somewhat straitened circumstances, but not in such squalid poverty as Gillray depicts them, in the accompanying illustration, where our hero may be seen, with his brothers and sisters, gnawing the _bony part_ of a shin of beef. Madame Junot[19] says, ‘Saveria told me that Napoleon was never a pretty boy, as Joseph had been; his head always appeared too large for his body, a defect common to the Bonaparte family. When Napoleon grew up, the peculiar charm of his countenance lay in his eye, especially in the mild expression it assumed in his moments of kindness. His anger, to be sure, was frightful, and though I am no coward, I never could look at him in his fits of rage without shuddering. Though his smile was captivating, yet the expression of his mouth when disdainful, or angry, could scarcely be seen without terror. But that forehead which seemed formed to bear the crowns of a whole world; those hands, of which the most coquettish woman might have been vain, and whose white skin covered muscles of iron; in short, of all that personal beauty which distinguished Napoleon as a young man, no traces were discernible in the boy.’ [Illustration: DEMOCRATIC INNOCENCE. The young Bonaparte and his wretched Relatives in their native Poverty, while Free Booters in the island of Corsica.] Napoleon said of himself: ‘I was an obstinate and inquisitive child. I was extremely headstrong; nothing overawed me, nothing disconcerted me. I made myself formidable to the whole family. My brother Joseph was the one with whom I was oftenest embroiled; he was bitten, beaten, abused: I went to complain before he had time to recover his confusion.’ At ten years of age, through the medium of his patron, Count Marbœuf, he was sent to the military school at Brienne, which he entered on April 23, 1779. Here he was shy and reserved, and not at all liked by his schoolfellows, who twitted him with his poverty, the country whence he came, his name, and made reflections on his mother; the last particularly exasperating him. His veracious Hudibrastic historian says:-- When he two years at school had been, He proved more violent and mean: Unlike his sprightly fellow boys, Amused with playthings and with toys; At shuttlecock he’d never stop, Nor deign to whip the bounding top. His garden was his sole delight, Which ne’er improv’d his mental sight; But thus in childhood serv’d to show He was to all mankind a foe. His schoolfellows, in keen sedateness, He robb’d to prove his urchin greatness: Deluded by his wheedling art, Some cheerfully resign’d a part Of their possessions, and to these } He added what he chose to seize; } Then, planting it with num’rous trees } And putting palisades all round, He strutted monarch of the ground;