Biologically speaking, Citizen Bonaparte was the second son of Madame Laetitia Bonaparte, née Ramolino, the wife of a Corsican lawyer of some small local importance. His spiritual mother, however, sat on the Place de la Concorde, knitted worsted stockings, and counted the heads which the guillotine chopped off. When his day of glory came, Bonaparte did not forget his faithful mother, and surrounded her with his signs of love and affection. But the foster-mother who had helped him directly to his glory, without whom he never might have been anything but the husband of the attractive Madame Josephine, he neglected, and when she seemed to stand between him and his success he dispatched her into the desert of oblivion, a region which during revolutionary times is never very far distant from the scene of momentary action. What Napoleon Bonaparte knew about Holland cannot have been very much. Geography, in a general sense, was not his strong point. Like everybody else in Paris, he must have known something about the Batavian Republic, and, like everybody else, he must have received vague notions of the dilatory methods, the insignificant acts, and the clumsiness of the different Batavian missions which sporadically appeared in Paris. Ginstokers who prepared parliamentary revolutions as delegates from private political clubs, generals who left their posts and went trotting to Paris to arrange another upheaval in the assembly of their native country, were not the type of men in whom the future emperor delighted. Of any sentiment or liking for the Dutch trait and character we find no vestige in Napoleon. There were one or two Dutch generals who won his favour, and one admiral even gained his friendship. He appreciated Dutch engineers because they could build good fortifications and excellent pontoon bridges. In general, however, the slow and deliberate Hollander greatly annoyed the man of impulsive deeds, and the tenacity with which these futile people defended their petty little rights and prerogatives, when actual and immense honours were in store for all men with devotion and energy, filled Napoleon with an irritation and a contempt which he never tried to conceal.