Take mine!" With that, he tossed his store of dry bread to the shepherd boys, and, walking back to town, ran in to visit his foster mother; that is, the woman who had been his nurse when he was a baby.
Nurse Camilla, as he called her, or sometimes "foster-mamma Camilla," was now the widow Ilari; but since her husband had been killed in one of those terrible family quarrels known as a Corsican _vendetta_, she had lived in a little house on one of the narrow streets of Ajaccio, not far from the Bonapartes.
She was very fond of her baby, as she called Napoleon; and when he told her of his disgrace at home, she said,-- "Bah! the sillies! Do they not know a truth-teller when they see one?
And so they would keep you on bread and water?
Not if Nurse Camilla can prevent it.

See, now! here is a plenty to eat, and just what my own boy likes, does he not?
Eat, eat, my son, and never mind the stale bread of that stingy Saveria." Then she petted and caressed the boy she so adored; she gave him the best her house afforded, and sent him away to his own home satisfied and filled, but especially jubilant, I fear, because he had got the best, as he termed it, of the home tyranny, and shown how he was able to do for himself even when he was driven to extremities.
It was this ability to use all the conditions of life for his own benefit, and to turn even privation and defeat into victory, that gave to Napoleon, when he became a man, that genius of mastery that made this neglected boy of Corsica the foremost man of all the world..