Excerpt from The Second Empire: Bonapartism, the Prince, the President, the Emperor Few careers (unless musicians are in question) possess any interest outside the narrow circle Of relatives and curio-hunters before the age of twenty is reached. The early years of their subjects are the chosen playground Of imaginative biographers, and a full supply of pleasing and significant incident has always been stimulated by the steady demand of those sympathetic students who are perpetually eager to hear their little hero lisping his first prayer, to watch his tiny fingers straining round the pommel of his father's sword. But the child is not, except in fables, the father of the man; and no circumstance of Napoleon's boyhood possesses the faintest Euro pean significance beyond the fact, distressing doubt less at the time to his anxious father and more regrettable subsequently to the populations of his fraternal kingdoms of Spain, Holland, Naples, and Westphalia, that he came of a large family. The family lived principally upon expectations from their father's litigation in that somewhat unsatisfactory frame of mind with which Dickens has familiarised his readers, and in a still Bleaker House in Ajaccio Carlo Buonaparte, who was that one figure in life more pathetic than a sick doctor (for he was a litigious lawyer), expected a judgment shortly in an interminable action in which he had cited as respon dents the Order Of Jesus and the French Crown. Such judgments are rarely delivered in the lifetime of the parties; and when the plaintiff died, he left little to his widow and his eight children beyond this welter of red tape and their wits. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.