In the middle of June 1791, Napoleon bade farewell to Auxonne and set out for Valence, where the Fourth Regiment was in garrison, he having been made first lieutenant of the first company of the second battalion. His brother accompanied him, lodging elsewhere, as it was not found convenient for Louis to remain in the same house. By way of recreation, frequent visits were paid to Madame de Colombier, but politics more and more absorbed Napoleon. He entered with great zest into the doings of the Society of the Friends of the Constitution, an avowedly revolutionary and republican gathering, and soon became so popular with its members that he was elected secretary and librarian. The Academy of Lyons having offered a handsome prize, amounting to about £50, for the best essay on “What Truths and what Sentiments is it most Important to impress upon Men for their Happiness?” Napoleon found further scope for his literary gifts. “By sentiment,” he assures us in his competitive composition, “we enjoy ourselves, nature, our country, and the men who surround us,” and in support of the statement he draws on his own experience. “You return to your country,” he writes; “after four years of absence, you visit the spots where you played in your earliest age, where you first experienced the knowledge of men and the awakening of the passions. In a moment you live the life of your childhood, you enjoy its pleasures, you are fired with the love of your country, you have a father and a tender mother, sisters still innocent, brothers who are like friends; too happy man, run, fly, do not lose a moment. If death stop you on your way you will never have known the delights of life, of sweet gratitude, of tender respect, of sincere friendship. These are the real pleasures of life, and they are greater if you have a wife and children.” He says hard things of immoderate ambition, the very disease which was to prove his own ruin, and calls it “a violent unreflecting madness, which only ceases with life--a conflagration, fanned by a pitiless wind, which does not end till it has consumed everything.” We wonder whether the Emperor, in his hours of introspection on the island of St Helena, when he was proving the truth of the above statement, ever thought of his essay. It did not gain the prize--Napoleon’s name was last but one on the list of competitors.