Bonaparte was now thirty-four. Thus far he had been not alone the tool of fate nor yet entirely the architect of his own fortunes; he had been both. In Corsica his immature powers had been thwarted by conditions beyond his control. During the Revolution he had caught at every straw which would spare his life and give him a living. Until his marriage he was a soldier of fortune, and fortune made it difficult, either by professional excellence or political scheming, to grasp any of her favors. Accordingly he went without them, suffering, erring, dreaming, philosophizing, observing, and gathering the experience which made him mature at the age when most men are still boys. The observer can descry no revolution in his character when opportunities began to open. There are the same unscrupulous enterprise, the same determination to seize the chances of the hour, the same ability to make the most of circumstances; but the grist is now wheat and the resultant output is flour. Every success is made introductory to another effort, and his scheming shows the same overweening self-confidence as that of his boyhood. Only now his plans unfold, not in the chill blasts of habitual failure, but in the mild breezes of prospering influences. Many historians proclaim the existence of a great life-scheme, declaring that with satanic powers the boy had prearranged every detail of his manhood. Of this there is not the slightest proof. All that is clear is the continued use, by a great mind tempered in the fires of experience, of ever greater opportunities as they arose. Like all men of commanding ability, Bonaparte belonged, not to one age, but to all ages. His elemental nature made the time and place and conditions in which he actually lived a means to his end, exactly as another century and another environment would have been. Whatever he might have been elsewhere or in another age, he was the personification of France as she was in his time, when he arrived by her desire and connivance at the height of his power. [Sidenote: 1803]