Chapter 1 - Page 2

day that I won the Emperor's medal; if you took
him away from the camp and the canteen, and spoke to him of books
or of art, he would sit and stare at you. But the highest
soldier is a man like myself who can understand the things of the
mind and the soul. It is true that I was very young when I
joined the army, and that the quarter- master was my only
teacher, but if you go about the world with your eyes open you
cannot help learning a great deal.

Thus I was able to admire the pictures in Venice, and to know the
names of the great men, Michael Titiens, and Angelus, and the
others, who had painted them. No one can say that Napoleon did
not admire them also, for the very first thing which he did when
he captured the town was to send the best of them to Paris. We
all took what we could get, and I had two pictures for my share.

One of them, called "Nymphs Surprised," I kept for myself, and
the other, "Saint Barbara," I sent as a present for my mother.

It must be confessed, however, that some of our men behaved very
badly in this matter of the statues and the pictures. The people
at Venice were very much attached to them, and as to the four
bronze horses which stood over the gate of their great church,
they loved them as dearly as if they had been their children. I
have always been a judge of a horse, and I had a good look at
these ones, but I could not see that there was much to be said
for them. They were too coarse-limbed for light cavalry charges
and they had not the weight for the gun-teams.

However, they were the only four horses, alive or dead, in the
whole town, so it was not to be expected that the people would
know any better. They wept bitterly when they were sent away,
and ten French soldiers were found floating in the canals that
night. As a punishment for these murders a great many more of
their pictures were sent away, and the soldiers took to breaking
the statues and firing their muskets at the stained-glass
windows.

This made the people furious, and there was very bad feeling in
the town. Many officers and men disappeared during that winter,
and even their bodies were never found.

For myself I had plenty to do, and I never found the time heavy
on my hands. In every country it has been my custom to try to
learn the language. For this reason I always look round for some
lady who will be kind enough to teach it to me, and then we
practise it together. This is the most interesting way of
picking it up, and before I was thirty I could speak nearly every
tongue in Europe; but it must be confessed that what you learn is
not of much use for the ordinary purposes of life. My business,
for example, has usually been with soldiers and