Napoleon himself narrowly escaped with his life. He was saved from a trap the Peraldis had set by the faithfulness of the Bonaparte tenants. He was forced to disguise himself, and lay concealed till arrangements could be made for his flight. Far-seeing was the judgment and inflexible the courage which must have sustained him in cutting loose entirely from his first love, Corsica, and casting himself upon revolutionary France. For it would have been an easy matter for him to have gone with the crowd and been a great man in Corsica. In his will Napoleon left 100,000 francs to Costa, the loyal friend to whom he owed life at the time the Paolists were hounding him down as a traitor. CHAPTER VI The French revolutionists had overturned the absolute monarchy of the Bourbons, but they themselves had split into factions. The Moderates who favored constitutional monarchy had been trodden under foot by the Girondins who favored a federated republic; and the Girondins, in their turn, had been crushed by the Jacobins who favored an undivided republic based upon the absolute political equality of all Frenchmen. To this doctrine they welded State-socialism with a boldness which shocked the world at the time, and converted it a few years later. The Girondins did not yield without a struggle, drawing to themselves all disaffected elements, including the royalists; and the revolt which followed was supported by the English. Threatened thus from within and without, the Revolution seemed doomed to perish. It was in the midst of this turmoil that the Bonapartes landed at Toulon in June, 1793. In a short while they removed to Marseilles. Warmly greeted by the Jacobins, who regarded them as martyrs to the good cause, the immediate necessities of the family were relieved by a small pension which the government had provided for such cases. Still, as they had fled in such haste from their house in Ajaccio that Madame Letitia had to snatch up the little Jerome and bear him in her arms, their condition upon reaching France was one of destitution. [Illustration: NAPOLEON From an engraving by Tomkins of a drawing from life during the campaign in Italy. In the collection of Mr. W. C. Crane] “One of the liveliest recollections of my youth,” said Prince Napoleon, son of Jerome Bonaparte, “is the account my father gave of the arrival of our family in a miserable house situated in the lanes of Meilhan,” a poor district of Marseilles. “They found themselves in the greatest poverty.”