If possible, Napoleon studied more diligently at Valence than at Brienne. Plutarch’s _Lives_ and Cæsar’s _Commentaries_ he had already mastered while a child; Rousseau had opened a new world of ideas to him in Paris: he now continued his historical studies by reading Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus. Anything relating to India, China, Arabia, had a peculiar charm for him. Next he learned all he could of Germany and England. French history he studied minutely, striving to exhaust information on the subject. In his researches he was not content merely with ordinary historical data: he sought to understand the secret meaning of events, and the origin of institutions. He studied legislation, statistics, the history of the Church, especially the relation of the Church to the State. Likewise he read the masterpieces of French literature and the critical judgments which had been passed upon them. Novels he did not disdain, and for poetry of the heroic cast he had a great fondness. He read also the works of Voltaire, Necker, Filangieri, and Adam Smith. With Napoleon to read was to study. He made copious notes, and these notes prove that he bent every faculty of his mind to the book in hand. He analyzed, commented, weighed statements in the balance of his own judgment--in short, doing everything necessary to the complete mastery of the subject. A paper on which he jotted down at that time his ideas of the relations between Church and State appear to show that he had reached at that time the conclusions he afterward embodied in the Concordat. Rousseau he studied again, but the book which seems to have taken his fancy more than any other was the Abbé Raynal’s famous _History of the Institutions and Commerce of the Europeans in the Two Indies_. This book was a miscellany of essays and extracts treating of superstition, tyranny, etc., and predicting that a revolution was at hand in France if abuses were not reformed. How was it that Napoleon, with his meagre salary, could command so many costly books? A recent biographer patly states that he “subscribed to a public library.” This may be true, but Napoleon himself explained to an audience of kings and princes at Erfurth, in 1808, that he was indebted to the kindness of one Marcus Aurelius, a rich bookseller, “a most obliging man who placed his books at my service.”