On final examination, August, 1785, Napoleon stood forty-second in his class--not a brilliant mark, certainly, but it sufficed. He received his appointment of sub-lieutenant with joy unbounded. His days of tutelage were over: henceforth he was a man and an officer. Having chosen the artillery service, he set out with Des Mazis, a friend he had made at the military school, to join the regiment of La Fère, which was stationed at Valence. According to one account, Napoleon borrowed money from a cloth merchant to make this journey; according to another, Des Mazis paid the way of both. However that may be, it seems that when the young officers reached Lyons, a gay city of the south, they relaxed the rigors of military discipline to such an extent that their money all vanished. The remainder of the distance to Valence was made on foot. * * * * * Those biographers who devote their lives to defaming Napoleon, lay stress on the alleged fact that he was educated by the King. In becoming an adherent of the Revolution, these writers say that he betrayed an amount of moral obliquity quite appalling. Louis XVI. was king while Napoleon was at Brienne, and the suggestion that Napoleon owed a debt of gratitude to Louis XVI. is amusing. The tax-payers, the people, educated Napoleon; and whatever debt of gratitude he owed, he owed to them. In going with the Revolution, he went with those who had paid his schooling. He himself drew this distinction at the time. When M. Demetrius Permon rebuked him for criticising royalty, throwing the alleged debt of gratitude in his teeth, the boy replied, “The State educates me; not the King.” Of course Permon could not admit the distinction, he being a noble of the Old Order; nor can biographers who write in the interest of modern Toryism admit it. But the distinction is there, nevertheless; the boy saw it, and so does impartial history. CHAPTER III