Made-dishes and delicate
beverages make one mellow and genial of disposition. What we need is
the kind of food that will destroy our amiability and put us in a
frame of mind calculated to make willing to kill our best friends--
nay, our own brothers and sisters--if occasion arises, with a smiling
face. Look at me. I could kill my brother Joseph, dear as he is to
me, and never shed a tear, and it's buckwheat-cakes and waffles that
have done it!"
Likewise he abhorred dancing.
"Away with dancing men!" he cried, impatiently, at one time when in
the height of his power, to his Minister of War. "Suppose when I was
crossing the Alps my soldiers had been of your dancing sort. How far
would I have got if every time the band played a two-step my
grenadiers had dropped their guns to pirouette over those snow-white
wastes? Let the diplomats do the dancing. For soldiers give me men
to whom the polka is a closed book and the waltz an abomination."
Holding these views, he naturally failed to win the sympathy of his
fellows at the Paris school who, young nobles for the most part,
could not understand his point of view. So, having nothing else to
do, he applied himself solely to his studies and to reflection, and
it was the happiest moment of his life up to that time when, having
passed his examinations for entrance to the regular army, he received
his commission as a second lieutenant.
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