He spent much of the time in his grotto, brooding over his wrongs, and thinking how he would act if people tried to treat him thus when he became a man.
The second day he dragged his toy cannon to his grotto, and made believe he was a Corsican patriot, intrenched in his fortifications, and holding the whole French army at bay; for though Corsica was a French possession, the people were still smarting under their wrongs, and hated their French oppressors, as they termed them.

Some years after, when he was a young man, Napoleon, talking about the home of his boyhood and the troubles of Corsica, said, "I was born while my country was dying.
Thirty thousand French thrown upon our shores, drowning the throne of liberty in blood--such was the horrid sight that first met my view.
The cries of the dying, the groans of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle at my birth." It was not quite as bad as all that.

But Napoleon liked to use big words and dramatic phrases.

It had been, in fact, very much like this before Napoleon was born.

He had heard all the stories of French tyranny and Corsican courage, and, like a true Corsican, was hot with wrath against the enslavers of his country, as he called the French.