Opening paragraphs....................

On December 17, 1778, thirty-two-year-old Carlo Maria (or Charles, as he now called himself) Buonaparte boarded a coastal vessel in the Corsican port of Ajaccio.  At his side, Joseph, ten, his eldest son;  Napoleone, or "Nabulio", nine, the second surviving son; and Charles's brother-in-law, Joseph Fesch, waved to their brothers, sisters, and friends.  They had just left their weatherbeaten four-story stone house in the Strada Malerba (Weedy Street), where Joseph and Nabulio had kissed their mother good-bye.  They were bound for France, where Joseph would enter the College d'Autun, preparatory to a career in the Church.  Nabulio would continue on to the Royal Military School of Brienne-le-Chateau, where he would learn what to many Corsicans was still an elusive language, French, along with history, geography, mathematics, and the other courses required prior to entering the Ecole Militaire of Paris.  The boys' amiable and mild young Uncle Fesch, their mother's half-brother, was off to the seminary at Aix-en-Provence to prepare for the priesthood.  Such was the end of Napoleon's brief childhood.
-Alan Schome, Napoleon Bonaparte