Buonaparte's last shift in the treatment of his book was most undignified and petty. With the unprincipled resentment of despair, in want of money, not of advice, he entirely remodeled it for the third time, its chapters being now put as fragmentary traditions into the mouth of a Corsican mountaineer. In this form it was dedicated to Necker, the famous Swiss, who as French minister of finance was vainly struggling with the problem of how to distribute taxation equally, and to collect from the privileged classes their share. A copy was first sent to a former teacher for criticism. His judgment was extremely severe both as to expression and style. In particular, attention was called to the disadvantage of indulging in so much rhetoric for the benefit of an overworked public servant like Necker, and to the inappropriateness of putting his own metaphysical generalizations and captious criticism of French royalty into the mouth of a peasant mountaineer. Before the correspondence ended, Napoleon's student life was over. Necker had fled, the French Revolution was rushing on with ever-increasing speed, and the young adventurer, despairing of success as a writer, seized the proffered opening to become a man of action. In a letter dated January twelfth, 1789, and written at Auxonne to his mother, the young officer gives a dreary account of himself. The swamps of the neighborhood and their malarious exhalations rendered the place, he thought, utterly unwholesome. At all events, he had contracted a low fever which undermined his strength and depressed his spirits. There was no immediate hope of a favorable response to the petition for the moneys due on the mulberry plantation because "this unhappy period in French finance delays furiously (_sic_) the discussion of our affair. Let us hope, however, that we may be compensated for our long and weary waiting and that we shall receive complete restitution." He writes further a terse sketch of public affairs in France and Europe, speaks despairingly of what the council of war has in store for the engineers by the proposed reorganization, and closes with tender remembrances to Joseph and Lucien, begging for news and reminding them that he had received no home letter since the preceding October. The reader feels that matters have come to a climax and that the scholar is soon to enter the arena of revolutionary activity. Curiously enough, the language used is French; this is probably due to the fact that it was intended for the family, rather than for the neighborhood circle. CHAPTER VIII. The Revolution in France.