Some of the lagging days were spent not only in novel-reading, as the Emperor in after years confessed to Mme. de Rémusat, but in attempts at novel-writing, to relieve the tedium of idle hours. It is said that first and last Buonaparte read "Werther" five times through. Enough remains among his boyish scribblings to show how fantastic were the dreams both of love and of glory in which he indulged. Many entertain a suspicion that amid the gaieties of the winter he had really lost his heart, or thought he had, and was repulsed. At least, in his "Dialogue on Love," written five years later, he says, "I, too, was once in love," and proceeds, after a few lines, to decry the sentiment as harmful to mankind, a something from which God would do well to emancipate it. This may have referred to his first meeting and conversation with a courtesan at Paris, which he describes in one of his papers, but this is not likely from the context, which is not concerned with the gratification of sexual passion. It is of the nobler sentiment that he speaks, and there seems to have been in the interval no opportunity for philandering so good as the one he had enjoyed during his boyish acquaintance with Mlle. Caroline du Colombier. It has, at all events, been her good fortune to secure, by this supposition, a place in history, not merely as the first girl friend of Napoleon, but as the object of his first pure passion. But these were his avocations; the real occupation of his time was study. Besides reading again the chief works of Rousseau, and devouring those of Raynal, his most beloved author, he also read much in the works of Voltaire, of Filangieri, of Necker, and of Adam Smith. With note-book and pencil he extracted, annotated, and criticized, his mind alert and every faculty bent to the clear apprehension of the subject in hand. To the conception of the state as a private corporation, which he had imbibed from Rousseau, was now added the conviction that the institutions of France were no longer adapted to the occupations, beliefs, or morals of her people, and that revolution was a necessity. To judge from a memoir presented some years later to the Lyons Academy, he must have absorbed the teachings of the "Two Indies" almost entire.