everything, which Napoleon's proclamations had led him to understand it to be." We can easily imagine what memories of wild outbursts of animal selfishness Beyle brought back with him from his campaign; of these the tale of Fabrice's experiences is probably composed. He had formed too high an estimate of the comradeship existing among soldiers, just as he had over-estimated the comradeship of schoolboys. About the year 1798 he began to devote himself with great ardour to the study of mathematics, for the characteristic reason, as he told his friends, that there was hypocrisy in every other science, but none, so far as he could discover, in the science of mathematics. But no doubt his ardour was stimulated by the growing fame of the young French general in Italy whom mathematics, practically applied in the science of artillery, had led from one great victory to another. His studies at an end, Beyle arrived in Paris on the 10th of November 1799, the day following the 18th Brumaire. He had a letter of introduction to the Daru family, who were relatives, and when, after the _coup d'état_, Pierre Daru was made Secretary of War and Inspector of Reviews, he gave young Beyle a place in his office. I fancy I can trace reminiscences of this appointment in the episode of Julien's appointment as secretary to the Comte de la Mole in (_Rouge et Noir_). Colomb tells that on one of the first days after Beyle entered on his duties, when he was writing a letter to Daru's dictation, he absently spelled _cela_ with two l's, and thereby brought on himself a playful, but none the less humiliating, reproof. A precisely similar incident occurs in the novel. But Daru was evidently a very much kinder and more considerate patron than the Comte de la Mole; he proved himself Beyle's faithful friend and benefactor. Besides his talent for military organisation, Daru had undoubted literary talent; his translations of Horace and his historical prose are excellent examples of the literary style of the Empire, and all the authors of that period looked up to him. It was a strange freak of fortune which determined that throughout most of his campaigns he should have in immediate attendance on him one of the literary pioneers of the following period--not that he had any suspicion of his protege's gifts, gifts of which the young man himself was scarcely conscious as yet.