A favorite motto with him, as a man, was: "The truest wisdom
is a resolute determination," and already he was putting it into
practice.
Soon after obtaining his commission, he left school on his first
assignment of active duty. Some riots had broken out at Lyons, and his
regiment of artillery was sent there. But things speedily quieted
down, leaving to him the monotony of garrison life. In telling about
it afterward he remarked:
"When I entered the service I found garrison life tedious. I began
reading novels, and that kind of reading proved interesting. I made an
attempt at writing some; this task gave range to my imagination. It
took hold of my knowledge of positive facts, and often I found
amusement in giving myself up to dreams in order to test them later by
the standard of my reasoning powers. I transported myself in thought
to an ideal world, and I sought to discover wherein lay the precise
difference between that and the world in which I lived."
Thus we see in the young soldier the same recluse and dreamer of
Brienne. In boyhood parlance today, he "flocked by himself," building
air castles which in part were to become reality.
As for his early attempts at authorship, he tried his hand with
indifferent success at fiction, essays, and history, but it is said
that he destroyed all this work, with the exception of a fragment,
"Letters on the History of Corsica," which was to have told the story
of his beloved island.
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