Napoleon was a very young and unsophisticated Corsican when, in October, 1795, he commanded the troops that protected the Convention, in session in the Tuileries, against the Paris “sections” and the National Guard which had deserted to the royalists. He was still young, but a man rotten with ambition when, after Waterloo, he fled to Paris, and, in the Palace of the Élysée, signed his abdication of the throne of his adopted country. In the twenty years intervening he had raised himself to the highest position in the army, and he had won the confidence of an unsettled people so that they turned to him for governmental guidance, and made him consul for ten years, then consul for life and then emperor. In the two decades he had done great harm, for, abroad, he had embroiled in war every country of Europe, and at home he had exhausted France of her young men and had left the country poorer in territory than when he was first made consul. Nevertheless, by the inevitable though sometimes inscrutable law of balance, the evil he had wrought was not without its compensating good. The countries of Europe learned as never before the meaning of the feeling of nationality and of the value of coöperation, while France--which, with her dependencies, Napoleon, at the height of his career, had spread over three-fifths of the map of western Europe--had gained self-confidence and stability and had crystallized the passionate chaos of the Revolutionary belief in the rights of man. Aside from his military and political genius Napoleon’s character underwent a striking development as his horizon enlarged. He belonged to a good but unimportant family which dwelt in a small town. His early manner of living was of the simplest, yet he grew to a love of splendor and to a knowledge of its usefulness in impressing the populace and in buying their approbation. Paris is connected with Napoleon throughout his whole career. He first appears when but a lad, brought to the Military School with several other boys by a priest. He lived in modest lodgings, at one time near the markets, and at another near the Place des Victoires. In 1795 the Convention drew up a new constitution by which the government was vested in a Directory of five members. Even in its early days Napoleon wrote from Paris to his brother of the change following upon the turbulent, sordid period of the Revolution. “Luxury, pleasure and art are reviving here surprisingly,” he said. “Carriages and men of fashion are all active once more, and the prolonged eclipse of their gay career seems now like a bad dream.”