Of his earliest education he said at the same time: "Like everything else in Corsica, it was pitiful." Lucien Buonaparte, his great-uncle, was a canon, a man of substance with an income of five thousand livres a year, and of some education--sufficient, at least, to permit his further ecclesiastical advancement. "Uncle" Fesch, whose father had received the good education of a Protestant Swiss boy, and had in turn imparted his knowledge to his own son, was the friend and older playmate of the turbulent little Buonaparte. The child learned a few notions of Bible history, and, doubtless, also the catechism, from the canon; by his eleven-year-old uncle he was taught his alphabet. In his sixth year he was sent to a dame's school. The boys teased him because his stockings were always down over his shoes, and for his devotion to the girls, one named Giacominetta especially. He met their taunts with blows, using sticks, bricks, or any handy weapon. According to his own story, he was fearless in the face of superior numbers, however large. His mother, according to his brother Joseph, declared that he was a perfect imp of a child. She herself described him as fond of playing at war with a drum, wooden sword, and files of toy soldiers. The pious nuns who taught him recognized a certain gift for figures in styling him their little mathematician. Later when in attendance at the Jesuit school he regularly encountered on his way thither a soldier with whom he exchanged his own piece of white bread for a morsel of the other's coarse commissary loaf. The excuse he gave, according to his mother, was that he must learn to like such food if he were to be a soldier. In time his passion for the simple mathematics he studied increased to such a degree that she assigned him a rough shed in the rear of their home as a refuge from the disturbing noise of the family. For exercise he walked the streets at nightfall with tumbled hair and disordered clothes. Of French he knew not a word; he had lessons at school in his mother tongue, which he learned to read under the instruction of the Abbé Recco. The worthy teacher arrayed his boys in two bodies: the diligent under the victorious standard of Rome, the idle as vanquished Carthaginians. Napoleon of right belonged to the latter, but he was transferred, not because of merit, by the sheer force of his imperious temper. This scanty information is all the trustworthy knowledge we possess concerning the little Napoleon up to his tenth year. With slight additions from other sources it is substantially the great Napoleon's own account of himself by the mouthpiece partly of his mother in his prosperous days, partly of Antommarchi in that last period of self-examination when, to him, as to other men, consistency seems the highest virtue. He was, doubtless, striving to compound with his conscience by emphasizing the adage that the child is father to the man--that he was born what he had always been.