CHAPTER I.—ARRIVAL IN CORSICA.
Lasciate ogni speranza voi ch' entrate.—Dante.
The voyage across to Corsica from Leghorn is very beautiful, and more interesting than that from Leghorn to Genoa. We have the picturesque islands of the Tuscan Channel constantly in view. Behind us lies the Continent, Leghorn with its forest of masts at the foot of Monte Nero; before us the lonely ruined tower of Meloria, the little island-cliff, near which the Pisans under Ugolino suffered that defeat from the Genoese, which annihilated them as a naval power, and put their victorious opponents in possession of Corsica; farther off, the rocky islet of Gorgona; and near it in the west, Capraja. We are reminded of Dante's verses, in the canto where he sings the fate of Ugolino—
"O Pisa! the disgrace of that fair land
Where Si is spoken: since thy neighbours round
Take vengeance on thee with a tardy hand,—
To dam the mouth of Arno's rolling tide
Let Capraja and Gorgona raise a mound
That all may perish in the waters wide."
The island of Capraja conceals the western extremity of Corsica; but behind it rise, in far extended outline, the blue hills of Cape Corso. Farther west, and off Piombino, Elba heaves its mighty mass of cliff abruptly from the sea, descending more gently on the side towards the Continent, which we could faintly descry in the extreme distance. The sea glittered in the deepest purple, and the sun, sinking behind Capraja, tinged the sails of passing vessels with a soft rose-red. A voyage on this basin of the Mediterranean is in reality a voyage through History itself. In thought, I saw these fair seas populous with the fleets of the Phœnicians and the Greeks, with the ships of those Phocæans, whose roving bands were once busy here;—then Hasdrubal, and the fleets of the Carthaginians, the Etruscans, the Romans, the Moors, and the Spaniards, the Pisans, and the Genoese. But still more impressively are we reminded, by the constant sight of Corsica and Elba, of the greatest drama the world's history has presented in modern times—the drama which bears the name of Napoleon. Both islands lie in peaceful vicinity to each other; as near almost as a man's cradle and his grave—broad, far-stretching Corsica, which gave Napoleon birth, and the little Elba, the narrow prison in which they penned the giant. He burst its rocky bonds as easily as Samson the withes of the Philistines. Then came his final fall at Waterloo. After Elba, he was merely an adventurer; like Murat, who, leaving Corsica, went, in imitation of Napoleon, to conquer Naples with a handful of soldiers, and met a tragic end.
The view of Elba throws a Fata Morgana into the excited fancy, the picture of the island of St. Helena lying far off in the African seas. Four islands, it seems, strangely influenced Napoleon's fate—Corsica, England, Elba, and St. Helena. He himself was an island in the ocean of universal history—unico nel mondo, as the stout Corsican sailor said, beside whom I stood, gazing on Corsica, and talking of Napoleon. "Ma Signore," said he, "I know all that better than you, for I am his countryman;" and now, with the liveliest gesticulations, he gave me an abridgment of Napoleon's history, which interested me more in the midst of this scenery than all the volumes of Thiers. And the nephew?—"I say the Napoleone primo was also the unico." The sailor was excellently versed in the history of his island, and was as well acquainted with the life of Sampiero as with those of Pasquale Paoli, Saliceti, and Pozzo di Borgo.
Night had fallen meanwhile. The stars shone brilliantly, and the waves phosphoresced. High over Corsica hung Venus, the stellone or great star, as the sailors call it, now serving us to steer by. We sailed between Elba and Capraja, and close past the rocks of the latter. The historian, Paul Diaconus, once lived here in banishment, as Seneca did, for eight long years, in Corsica. Capraja is a naked granite rock. A Genoese tower stands picturesquely on a cliff, and the only town in the island, of the same name, seems to hide timidly behind the gigantic crag which the fortress crowns. The white walls and white houses, the bare, reddish rocks, and the wild and desolate seclusion of the place, give the impression of some lonely city among the cliffs of Syria. Capraja, which the bold Corsicans made a conquest of in the time of Paoli, remained in possession of the Genoese when they sold Corsica to France; with Genoa it fell to Piedmont.
Capraja and its lights had vanished, and we were nearing the coast of Corsica, on which fires could be seen glimmering here and there. At length we began to steer for the lighthouse of Bastia. Presently we were in the harbour. The town encircles it; to the left the old Genoese fort, to the right the Marina, high above it in the bend a background of dark hills. A boat came alongside for the passengers who wished to go ashore.
And now I touched, for the first time, the soil of Corsica—an island which had attracted me powerfully even in my childhood, when I saw it on the map. When we first enter a foreign country, particularly if we enter it during the night, which veils everything in a mysterious obscurity, a strange expectancy, a burden of vague suspense, fills the mind, and our first impressions influence us for days. I confess my mood was very sombre and uneasy, and I could no longer resist a certain depression.
In the north of Europe we know little more of Corsica than that Napoleon was born there, that Pasquale Paoli struggled heroically there for freedom, and that the Corsicans practise hospitality and the Vendetta, and are the most daring bandits. The notions I had brought with me were of the gloomiest cast, and the first incidents thrown in my way were of a kind thoroughly to justify them.
Our boat landed us at the quay, on which the scanty light of some hand-lanterns showed a group of doganieri and sailors standing. The boatman sprang on shore. I have hardly ever seen a man of a more repulsive aspect. He wore the Phrygian cap of red wool, and had a white cloth tied over one eye; he was a veritable Charon, and the boundless fury with which he screamed to the passengers, swearing at them, and examining the fares by the light of his lantern, gave me at once a specimen of the ungovernably passionate temperament of the Corsicans.
The group on the quay were talking eagerly. I heard them tell how a quarter of an hour ago a Corsican had murdered his neighbour with three thrusts of a dagger (ammazzato, ammazzato—a word never out of my ears in Corsica; ammazzato con tre colpi di pugnale). "On what account?" "Merely in the heat of conversation; the sbirri are after him; he will be in the macchia by this time." The macchia is the bush. I heard the word macchia in Corsica just as often as ammazzato or tumbato. He has taken to the macchia, is as much as to say, he has turned bandit.
I was conscious of a slight shudder, and that suspense which the expectation of strange adventures creates. I was about to go in search of a locanda—a young man stepped up to me and said, in Tuscan, that he would take me to an inn. I followed the friendly Italian—a sculptor of Carrara. No light was shed on the steep and narrow streets of Bastia but by the stars of heaven. We knocked in vain at four locandas; none opened. We knocked at the fifth; still no answer. "We shall not find admittance here," said the Carrarese; "the landlord's daughter is lying on her bier." We wandered about the solitary streets for an hour; no one would listen to our appeals. Is this the famous Corsican hospitality? I thought; I seem to have come to the City of the Dead; and to-morrow I will write above the gate of Bastia: "All hope abandon, ye who enter here!"
However, we resolved to make one more trial. Staggering onwards, we came upon some other passengers in the same unlucky plight as myself; they were two Frenchmen, an Italian emigrant, and an English convert. I joined them, and once more we made the round of the locandas. This first night's experience was by no means calculated to inspire one with a high idea of the commercial activity and culture of the island; for Bastia is the largest town in Corsica, and has about fifteen thousand inhabitants. If this was the stranger's reception in a city, what was he to expect in the interior of the country?
A band of sbirri met us, Corsican gendarmes, dusky-visaged fellows with black beards, in blue frock-coats, with white shoulder-knots, and carrying double-barrelled muskets. We made complaint of our unfortunate case to them. One of them offered to conduct us to an old soldier who kept a tavern; there, he thought, we should obtain shelter. He led us to an old, dilapidated house opposite the fort. We kept knocking till the soldier-landlord awoke, and showed himself at the window. At the same moment some one ran past—our sbirro after him without saying a word, and both had vanished in the darkness of the night. What was it?—what did this hot pursuit mean? After some time the sbirro returned; he had imagined the runner was the murderer. "But he," said the gendarme, "is already in the hills, or some fisherman has set him over to Elba or Capraja. A short while ago we shot Arrighi in the mountains, Massoni too, and Serafino. That was a tough fight with Arrighi: he killed five of our people."
The old soldier came to the door, and led us into a large, very dirty apartment. We gladly seated ourselves round the table, and made a hearty supper on excellent Corsican wine, which has somewhat of the fire of the Spanish, good wheaten bread, and fresh ewe-milk cheese. A steaming oil-lamp illuminated this Homeric repast of forlorn travellers; and there was no lack of good humour to it. Many a health was drained to the heroes of Corsica, and our soldier-host brought bottle after bottle from the corner. There were four nations of us together, Corsican, Frenchman, German, and Lombard. I once mentioned the name of Louis Bonaparte, and put a question—the company was struck dumb, and the faces of the lively Frenchmen lengthened perceptibly.
Gradually the day dawned outside. We left the casa of the old Corsican, and, wandering to the shore, feasted our eyes upon the sea, glittering in the mild radiance of the early morning. The sun was rising fast, and lit up the three islands visible from Bastia—Capraja, Elba, and the small Monte Christo. A fourth island in the same direction is Pianosa, the ancient Planasia, on which Agrippa Posthumus, the grandson of Augustus, was strangled by order of Tiberius; as its name indicates, it is flat, and therefore cannot be distinguished from our position. The constant view of these three blue islands, along the edge of the horizon, makes the walks around Bastia doubly beautiful.
I seated myself on the wall of the old fort and looked out upon the sea, and on the little haven of the town, in which hardly half a dozen vessels were lying. The picturesque brown rocks of the shore, the green heights with their dense olive-groves, little chapels on the strand, isolated gray towers of the Genoese, the sea, in all the pomp of southern colouring, the feeling of being lost in a distant island, all this made, that morning, an indelible impression on my soul.
As I left the fort to settle myself in a locanda, now by daylight, a scene presented itself which was strange, wild, and bizarre enough. A crowd of people had collected before the fort, round two mounted carabineers; they were leading by a long cord a man who kept springing about in a very odd manner, imitating all the movements of a horse. I saw that he was a madman, and flattered himself with the belief that he was a noble charger. None of the bystanders laughed, though the caprioles of the unfortunate creature were whimsical enough. All stood grave and silent; and as I saw these men gazing so mutely on the wretched spectacle, for the first time I felt at ease in their island, and said to myself, the Corsicans are not barbarians. The horsemen at length rode away with the poor fellow, who trotted like a horse at the end of his line along the whole street, and seemed perfectly happy. This way of getting him to his destination by taking advantage of his fixed idea, appeared to me at once sly and naïve.
CHAPTER II.
THE CITY OF BASTIA.
The situation of Bastia, though not one of the very finest, takes one by surprise. The town lies like an amphitheatre round the little harbour; the sea here does not form a gulf, but only a landing-place—a cala. A huge black rock bars the right side of the harbour, called by the people Leone, from its resemblance to a lion. Above it stands the gloomy Genoese fort, called the Donjon. To the left, the quay runs out in a mole, at the extremity of which is a little lighthouse. The town ascends in terraces above the harbour; its houses are high, crowded together, tower-shaped, and have many balconies: away beyond the town rise the green hills, with some forsaken cloisters, beautiful olive-groves, and numerous fruit-gardens of oranges, lemons, and almonds.
Bastia has its name from the fortifications or bastions, erected there by the Genoese. The city is not ancient; neither Pliny, Strabo, nor Ptolemy, mentions any town as occupying its site. Formerly the little marina of the neighbouring town of Cardo stood here. In the year 1383, the Genoese Governor, Lionello Lomellino, built the Donjon or Castle, round which a new quarter of the town arose, which was called the Terra Nuova, the original lower quarter now receiving the name of Terra Vecchia. Both quarters still form two separate cantons. The Genoese now transferred the seat of their Corsican government to Bastia, and here resided the Fregosos, Spinolas, Dorias—within a space of somewhat more than four hundred years, eleven Dorias ruled in Corsica—the Fiescos, Cibbàs, the Guistiniani, Negri, Vivaldi, Fornari, and many other nobles of celebrated Genoese families. When Corsica, under French supremacy, was divided into two departments in 1797, which were named after the rivers Golo and Liamone, Bastia remained the principal town of the department of the Golo. In the year 1811, the two parts were again united, and the smaller Ajaccio became the capital of the country. Bastia, however, has not yet forgotten that it was once the capital, though it has now sunk to a sub-prefecture; and it is, in fact, still, in point of trade, commerce, and intelligence, the leading city of Corsica. The mutual jealousy of the Bastinese and the citizens of Ajaccio is almost comical, and would appear a mere piece of ridiculous provincialism, did we not know that the division of Corsica into the country this side and beyond the mountains, is historical, and dates from a remote antiquity, while the character of the inhabitants of the two halves is also entirely different. Beyond the mountains which divide Corsica from north to south, the people are much ruder and wilder, and all go armed; this side the mountains there is much more culture, the land is better tilled, and the manners of the population are gentler.
The Terra Vecchia of Bastia has nowadays, properly speaking, become the Terra Nuova, for it contains the best streets. The stateliest of them is the Via Traversa, a street of six and seven-storied houses, bending towards the sea; it is only a few years old, and still continues to receive additions. Its situation reminded me of the finest street I have ever seen, the Strada Balbi and Nuova in Genoa. But the houses, though of palatial magnitude, have nothing to boast of in the way of artistic decoration, or noble material. The very finest kinds of stone exist in Corsica in an abundance scarcely credible—marble, porphyry, serpentine, alabaster, and the costliest granite; and yet they are hardly ever used. Nature is everywhere here abandoned to neglect; she is a beautiful princess under a spell.
They are building a Palace of Justice in the Via Traversa at present, for the porticos of which I saw them cutting pillars in the marble quarries of Corte. Elsewhere, I looked in vain for marble ornament; and yet—who would believe it?—the whole town of Bastia is paved with marble—a reddish sort, quarried in Brando. I do not know whether it is true that Bastia has the best pavement in the world; I have heard it said.
Despite its length and breadth, the Via Traversa is the least lively of all the streets of Bastia. All the bustle and business are concentrated in the Place Favalelli, on the quay, and in the Terra Nuova, round the Fort. In the evening, the fashionable world promenades in the large Place San Nicolao, by the sea, where are the offices of the sub-prefecture, and the highest court of justice.
Not a single building of any architectural pretensions fetters the eye of the stranger here; he must find his entertainment in the beautiful walks along the shore, and on the olive-shaded hills. Some of the churches are large, and richly decorated; but they are clumsy in exterior, and possess no particular artistic attraction. The Cathedral, in which a great many Genoese seigniors lie entombed, stands in the Terra Nuova; in the Terra Vecchia is the large Church of St. John the Baptist. I mention it merely on account of Marbœuf's tomb. Marbœuf governed Corsica for sixteen years; he was the friend of Carlo Bonaparte, once so warm an adherent of Paoli; and it was he who opened the career of Napoleon, for he procured him his place in the military school of Brienne. His tomb in the church referred to bears no inscription; the monument and epitaph, as they originally existed, were destroyed in the Paolistic revolution against France. The Corsican patriots at that time wrote on the tomb of Marbœuf: "The monument which disgraceful falsehood and venal treachery dedicated to the tyrant of groaning Corsica, the true liberty and liberated truth of all rejoicing Corsica have now destroyed." After Napoleon had become Emperor, Madame Letitia wished to procure the widow of Marbœuf a high position among the ladies of honour in the imperial court; but Napoleon luckily avoided such gross want of tact, perceiving how unsuitable it was to offer Mme. Marbœuf a subordinate charge in the very family which owed so much to the patronage of her husband. He granted Marbœuf's son a yearly pension of ten thousand francs; but the young general fell at the head of his regiment in Russia. The little theatre in Bastia is a memorial of Marbœuf; it was built at his expense.
Another Frenchman of note lies buried in the Church of St. John—Count Boissieux, who died in the year 1738. He was a nephew of the celebrated Villars; but as a military man, had no success.
The busy stir in the markets, and the life about the port, were what interested me by far the most in Bastia.
There was the fish-market, for example. I never omitted paying a morning visit to the new arrivals from the sea; and when the fishermen had caught anything unusual, they showed it me in a friendly way, and would say—"This, Signore, is a murena, and this is the razza, and these are the pesce spada, and the pesce prete, and the beautiful red triglia, and the capone, and the grongo." Yonder in the corner, as below caste, sit the pond-fishers: along the east coast of Corsica are large ponds, separated from the sea by narrow tongues of land, but connected with it by inlets. The fishermen take large and well-flavoured fish in these, with nets of twisted rushes, eels in abundance—mugini, ragni, and soglie. The prettiest of all these fish is the murena; it is like a snake, and as if formed of the finest porphyry. It pursues the lobster (legusta), into which it sucks itself; the legusta devours the scorpena, and the scorpena again the murena. So here we have another version of the clever old riddle of the wolf, the lamb, and the cabbage, and how they were to be carried across a river. I am too little of a diplomatist to settle this intricate cross-war of the three fishes; they are often caught all three in the same net. Tunny and anchovies are caught in great quantities in the gulfs of Corsica, especially about Ajaccio and Bonifazio. The Romans had no liking for Corsican slaves—they were apt to be refractory; but the Corsican fish figured on the tables of the great, and even Juvenal has a word of commendation for them.
The market in the Place Favalelli presents in the morning a fresh, lively, motley picture. There sit the peasant women with their vegetables, and the fruit-girls with their baskets, out of which the beautiful fruits of the south look laughingly. One only needs to visit this market to learn what the soil of Corsica can produce in the matter of fruit; here are pears and apples, peaches and apricots, plums of every sort; there green almonds, oranges and lemons, pomegranates; near them potatoes, then bouquets of flowers, yonder green and blue figs, and the inevitable pomi d'oro (pommes d'amour); yonder again the most delicious melons, at a soldo or penny each; and in August come the muscatel-grapes of Cape Corso. In the early morning, the women and girls come down from the villages round Bastia, and bring their fruit into the town. Many graceful forms are to be seen among them. I was wandering one evening along the shore towards Pietra Nera, and met a young girl, who, with her empty fruit-basket on her head, was returning to her village. "Buona sera—Evviva, Siore." We were soon in lively conversation. This young Corsican girl related to me the history of her heart with the utmost simplicity;—how her mother was compelling her to marry a young man she did not like. "Why do you not like him?" "Because his ingegno does not please me, ah madonna!" "Is he jealous?" "Come un diavolo, ah madonna! I nearly ran off to Ajaccio already." As we walked along talking, a Corsican came up, who, with a pitcher in his hand, was going to a neighbouring spring. "If you wish a draught of water," said he, "wait a little till I come down, and you, Paolina, come to me by and bye: I have something to say to you about your marriage."
"Look you, sir," said the girl, "that is one of our relations; they are all fond of me, and when they meet me, they do not pass me with a good evening; and none of them will hear of my marrying Antonio." By this time we were approaching her house. Paolina suddenly turned to me, and said with great seriousness—"Siore, you must turn back now; if I go into my village along with you, the people will talk ill of me (faranne mal grido). But come to-morrow, if you like, and be my mother's guest, and after that we will send you to our relations, for we have friends enough all over Cape Corso." I returned towards the city, and in presence of the unspeakable beauty of the sea, and the silent calm of the hills, on which the goat-herds had begun to kindle their fires, my mood became quite Homeric, and I could not help thinking of the old hospitable Phæacians and the fair Nausicaa.
The head-dress of the Corsican women is the mandile, a handkerchief of any colour, which covers the forehead, and smoothly enwrapping the head, is wound about the knot of hair behind; so that the hair is thus concealed. The mandile is in use all over Corsica; it looks Moorish and Oriental, and is of high antiquity, for there are female figures on Etrurian vases represented with the mandile. It is very becoming on young girls, less so on elderly women; it makes the latter look like the Jewish females. The men wear the pointed brown or red baretto, the ancient Phrygian cap, which Paris, son of Priam, wore. The marbles representing this Trojan prince give him the baretto; the Persian Mithras also wears it, as I have observed in the common symbolic group where Mithras is seen slaying the bull. Among the Romans, the Phrygian cap was the usual symbol of the barbarians; the well-known Dacian captives of the triumphal arch of Trajan which now stand on the arch of Constantine, wear it; so do other barbarian kings and slaves, Sarmatian and Asiatic, whom we find represented in triumphal processions. The Venetian Doge also wore a Phrygian cap as a symbol of his dignity.
The women in Corsica carry all their burdens on their head, and the weight they will thus carry is hardly credible; laden in this way, they often hold the spindle in their hand, and spin as they walk along. It is a picturesque sight, the women of Bastia carrying their two-handled brazen water-pitchers on their head; these bear a great resemblance to the antique consecrated vases of the temples; I never saw them except in Bastia; beyond the mountains they fetch their water in stone pitchers, of rude but still slightly Etruscan form.
"Do you see yonder woman with the water-pitcher on her head?" "Yes, what is remarkable about her?" "She might perhaps have been this day a princess of Sweden, and the consort of a king." "Madre di Dio!" "Do you see yonder village on the hillside? that is Cardo. The common soldier Bernadotte one day fell in love with a peasant girl of Cardo. The parents would not let the poor fellow court her. The povero diavolo, however, one day became a king, and if he had married that girl, she would have been a queen; and now her daughter there, with the water on her head, goes about and torments herself that she is not Princess of Sweden." It was on the highway from Bastia to San Fiorenzo that Bernadotte worked as a common soldier on the roads. At Ponte d'Ucciani he was made corporal, and very proud he was of his advancement. He now watched as superintendent over the workmen; afterwards he copied the rolls for Imbrico, clerk of court at Bastia. There is still a great mass of them in his handwriting among the archives at Paris.
It was on the Bridge of Golo, some miles from Bastia, that Massena was made corporal. Yes, Corsica is a wonderful island. Many a one has wandered among the lonely hills here, who never dreamed that he was yet to wear a crown. Pope Formosus made a beginning in the ninth century—he was a native of the Corsican village of Vivario; then a Corsican of Bastia followed him in the sixteenth century, Lazaro, the renegade, and Dey of Algiers; in the time of Napoleon, a Corsican woman was first Sultaness of Morocco; and Napoleon himself was first Emperor of Europe.
CHAPTER III.
ENVIRONS OF BASTIA.
How beautiful the walks are here in the morning, or at moon-rise! A few steps and you are by the sea, or among the hills, and there or here, you are rid of the world, and deep in the refreshing solitude of nature. Dense olive-groves fringe some parts of the shore. I often lay among these, beside a little retired tomb, with a Moorish cupola, the burial-vault of some family, and looked out upon the sea, and the three islands on its farthest verge. It was a spot of delicious calm; the air was so sunny, so soothingly still, and wherever the eye rested, holiday repose and hermit loneliness, a waste of brown rocks on the strand, covered with prickly cactus, solitary watch-towers, not a human being, not a bird upon the water; and to the right and left, warm and sunny, the high blue hills.
I mounted the heights immediately above Bastia. From these there is a very pleasant view of the town, the sea, and the islands. Vineyards, olive-gardens, orange-trees, little villas of forms the most bizarre; here and there a fan-palm, tombs among cypresses, ruins quite choked in ivy, are scattered on every side. The paths are difficult and toilsome; you wander over loose stones, over low walls, between bramble-hedges, among trailing ivy, and a wild and rank profusion of thistles. The view of the shore to the south of Bastia surprised me. The hills there, like almost all the Corsican hills, of a fine pyramidal form, retire farther from the shore, and slope gently down to a smiling plain. In this level lies the great pond of Biguglia, encircled with reeds, dead and still, hardly a fishing-skiff cutting its smooth waters. The sun was just sinking as I enjoyed this sight. The lake gleamed rosy red, the hills the same, and the sea was full of the evening splendour, with a single ship gliding across. The repose of a grand natural scene calms the soul. To the left I saw the cloister of San Antonio, among olive-trees and cypresses; two priests sat in the porch, and some black-veiled nuns were coming out of the church. I remembered a picture I had once seen of evening in Sicily, and found it here reproduced.
Descending to the highway, I came to a road which leads to Cervione; herdsmen were driving home their goats, riders on little red horses flew past me, wild fellows with bronzed faces, all with the Phrygian cap on their heads, the dark brown Corsican jacket of sheeps'-wool hanging loosely about them, double-barrels slung upon their backs. I often saw them riding double on their little animals: frequently a man with a woman behind him, and if the sun was hot they were always holding a large umbrella above them. The parasol is here indispensable; I frequently saw both men and women—the women clothed, the men naked—sitting at their ease in the shallow water near the shore, and holding the broad parasol above their heads, evidently enjoying themselves mightily. The women here ride like the men, and manage their horses very cleverly. The men have always the zucca or round gourd-bottle slung behind them; often, too, a pouch of goatskin, zaino, and round their middle is girt the carchera—a leathern belt which holds their cartridges.
Before me walked numbers of men returning from labour in the fields; I joined them, and learned that they were not Corsicans, but Italians from the Continent. More than five thousand labourers come every year from Italy, particularly from Leghorn, and the country about Lucca and Piombino, to execute the field labour for the lazy Corsicans. Up to the present day the Corsicans have maintained a well-founded reputation for indolence, and in this they are thoroughly unlike other brave mountaineers, as, for example, the Samnites. All these foreign workmen go under the common appellation of Lucchesi. I have been able personally to convince myself with what utter contempt these poor and industrious men are looked on by the Corsicans, because they have left their home to work in the sweat of their brow, exposed to a pestilential atmosphere, in order to bring their little earnings to their families. I frequently heard the word "Lucchese" used as an opprobrious epithet; and particularly among the mountains of the interior is all field-work held in detestation as unworthy of a freeman; the Corsican is a herdsman, as his forefathers have been from time immemorial; he contents himself with his goats, his repast of chestnuts, a fresh draught from the spring, and what his gun can bring down.
I learned at the same time that there were at present in Corsica great numbers of Italian democrats, who had fled to the island on the failure of the revolution. There were during the summer about one hundred and fifty of them scattered over the island, men of all ranks; most of them lived in Bastia. I had opportunities of becoming acquainted with the most respectable of these refugees, and of accompanying them on their walks. They formed a company as motley as political Italy herself—Lombards, Venetians, Neapolitans, Romans, and Florentines. I experienced the fact that in a country where there is little cultivated society, Italians and Germans immediately exercise a mutual attraction, and have on neutral ground a brotherly feeling for each other. There was a universality in the events and results of the year 1848, which broke down many limitations, and produced certain views of life and certain theories within which individuals, to whatever nationalities they may belong, feel themselves related and at home. I found among these exiles in Corsica men and youths of all classes, such as are to be met with in similar companies at home—enthusiastic and sanguine spirits; others again, men of practical experience, sound principle, and clear intellect.
The world is at present full of the political fugitives of European nations; they are especially scattered over the islands, which have long been, and are in their nature destined to be, used as asylums. There are many exiles in the Ionian Islands and in the islands of Greece, many in Sardinia and Corsica, many in the islands of the English Channel, most of all in Britain. It is a general and European lot which has fallen to these exiles—only the locality is different; and banishment itself, as a result of political crime, or political misfortune, is as old as the history of organized states. I remembered well how in former times the islands of the Mediterranean—Samos, Delos, Ægina, Corcyra, Lesbos, Rhodes—sheltered the political refugees of Greece, as often as revolution drove them from Athens or Thebes, or Corinth or Sparta. I thought of the many exiles whom Rome sent to the islands in the time of the Emperors, as Agrippa Posthumus to Planasia, the philosopher Seneca to Corsica itself. Corsica particularly has been at all times not only a place of refuge, but a place of banishment; in the strictest sense of the word, therefore, an island of bandits, and this it still is at the present day. The avengers of blood wander homeless in the mountains, the political fugitives dwell homeless in the towns. The ban of outlawry rests upon both, and if the law could reach them, their fate would be the prison, if not death.
Corsica, in receiving these poor banished Italians, does more than simply practise her cherished religion of hospitality, she discharges a debt of gratitude. For in earlier centuries Corsican refugees found the most hospitable reception in all parts of Italy; and banished Corsicans were to be met with in Rome, in Florence, in Venice, and in Naples. The French government has hitherto treated its guests on the island with liberality and tolerance. The remote seclusion of their position compels these exiles to a life of contemplative quiet; and they are, perhaps precisely on this account, more fortunate than their brethren in misfortune in Jersey or London.
CHAPTER IV.
FRANCESCO MARMOCCHI OF FLORENCE—THE GEOLOGY OF CORSICA.
Hic sola hæc duo sunt, exul, et exilium.—Seneca in Corsica.
Προσκυνοῦντες τὴν εἱμαρμένην σοφοὶ .—Æschyl. Prom.
I was told in a bookseller's shop into which I had gone in search of a Geography of the island, that there was one then in the press, and that its author was Francesco Marmocchi, a banished Florentine. I immediately sought this gentleman out, and made in him one of the most valuable of all my Italian acquaintances. I found a man of prepossessing exterior, considerably above thirty, in a little room, buried among books. Possibly the rooms of most political exiles do not present such a peaceful aspect. On the bookshelves were the best classical authors; and my eye lighted with no small pleasure on Humboldt's Cosmos; on the walls were copperplate views of Florence, and an admirable copy of a Perugino; all this told not only of the seclusion of a scholar, but of that of a highly cultivated Florentine. There are perhaps few greater contrasts than that between Florence and Corsica, and my own feelings were at first certainly peculiar, when, after six weeks' stay in Florence, I suddenly exchanged the Madonnas of Raphael for the Corsican banditti; but it is always to be remembered that Corsica is an island of enchanting beauty; and though banishment to paradise itself would remain banishment, still the student of nature may at least, as Seneca did, console himself here with the grandeur and beauty around him, in undisturbed tranquillity. All that Seneca wrote from his Corsican exile to his mother on the consolation to be found in contemplating nature, and in science, Francesco Marmocchi may fully apply to himself. This former Florentine professor seemed to me, in his dignified retirement and learned leisure, the happiest of all exiles.
Francesco Marmocchi was minister of Tuscany during the revolution, along with Guerazzi; he was afterwards secretary to the ministry: more fortunate than his political friend, he escaped from Florence to Rome, and then from Rome to Corsica, where he had already lived three years. His unwearied activity, and the stoical serenity with which he bears his exile, attest the manly vigour of his character. Francesco Marmocchi is one of the most esteemed and talented Italian geographers. Besides his great work, a Universal Geography in six quarto volumes, a new edition of which is at present publishing, he has written a special Geography of Italy in two volumes; a Historical Geography of the Ancient World, of the Middle Ages, and of Modern Times; a Natural History of Italy, and other works. I found him correcting the proof-sheets of his little Geography of Corsica, an excellent hand-book, which he has unfortunately been obliged to write in French. This book is published in Bastia, by Fabiani; it has afforded me some valuable information about Corsica.
One morning before sunrise we went into the hills round Cardo, and here, amid the fresh bloom of the Corsican landscape, if the reader will suppose himself in our company, we shall take the geographer himself for guide and interpreter, and hear what he has to say upon the island. I give almost the very words of his Geography.
Corsica owes her existence to successive conglobations of upheaved masses; during an extended period she has had three great volcanic processes, to which the bizarre and abrupt contours of her landscape are to be ascribed. These three upheavals may be readily distinguished. The first masses of Corsican land that rose were those that occupy the entire south-western side. This earliest upheaval took place in a direction from north-west to south-east; its marks are the two great ribs of mountain which run parallel, from north-east to south-west, down towards the sea, and form the most important promontories of the west coast. The axis of Corsica at that time must therefore have been different from its later one; and the islands in the channel of Bonifazio, as well as a part of the north-east of Sardinia, then stood in connexion with Corsica. The material of this first upheaval is mostly granite; consequently at the period of this primeval revolution there was no life of any sort on the island.
The direction of the second upheaval was from south-west to north-east, and the material here again consists largely of granitoids. But as we advance to the north-east, we find the granite gradually giving way to the ophiolitic (ophiolitisch) earth system. The second upheaval is, however, hardly discernible. It is clear that it destroyed most of the northern ridge of the first; but Corsican geology has preserved very few traces of it.
The undoubted effect of the third and last upheaval was the almost entire destruction of the southern portion of the first; and it was at this time the island received its present form. It occurred in a direction from north to south. So long as the masses of this last eruption have not come in contact with the masses of previous upheavals, their direction remains regular, as is shown by the mountain-chain of Cape Corso. But it had to burst its way through the towering masses of the southern ridge with a fearful shock; it broke them up, altering its direction, and sustaining interruption at many points, as is shown by the openings of the valleys, which lead from the interior to the plain of the east coast, and have become the beds of the streams that flow into the sea on this side—the Bevinco, the Golo, the Tavignano, the Fiumorbo, and others.
The rock strata of this third upheaval are primitive ophiolitic and primitive calcareous, covered at various places by secondary formations.
The primitive masses, which occupy, therefore, the south and west of the island, consist almost entirely of granite. At their extremities they include some layers of gneiss and slate. The granite is almost everywhere covered—a clear proof that it was elevated at a period antecedent to that during which the covering masses were forming in the bosom of the ocean, to be deposited in horizontal strata on the crystalline granite masses. Strata of porphyry and eurite pierce the granite; a decided porphyritic formation crowns Mounts Cinto, Vagliorba, and Perturato, the highest summits of Niolo, overlying the granite. From two to three feet of mighty greenstone penetrate these porphyritic rocks.
The intermediary masses occupy the whole of Cape Corso, and the east of the island. They consist of bluish gray limestone, huge masses of talc, stalactites, serpentine, euphotides, quartz, felspar, and porphyries.
The tertiary formations appear only in isolated strips, as at San Fiorenzo, Volpajola, Aleria, and Bonifazio. They exhibit numerous fossils of marine animals of subordinate species—sea-urchins, polypi, and many other petrifactions in the limestone layers.
In regard to the plains of the east coast of Corsica, as the plains Biguglia, Mariana, and Aleria, they are diluvial deposits of the period when the floods destroyed vast numbers of animal species. Among the diluvial fossils in the neighbourhood of Bastia, the head of a lagomys has been found—a small hare without tail, existing at the present day in Siberia.
There is no volcano in Corsica; but traces of extinct volcanoes may be seen near Porto Vecchio, Aleria, Balistro, San Manza, and at other points.
It seems almost incredible that an island like Corsica, so close to Sardinia and Tuscany, and, above all, so near the iron island of Elba, should be so poor in metals as it really is. Numerous indications of metallic veins are, it is true, to be found everywhere, now of iron or copper, now of lead, antimony, manganese, quicksilver, cobalt, gold and silver, but these, as the engineer Gueymard has shown in his work on the geology and mineralogy of Corsica, are illusory.
The only metal mines of importance that can be wrought, are, at present, the iron mines of Olmeta and Farinole in Cape Corso, an iron mine near Venzolasca, the copper mine of Linguizzetta, the antimony mine of Ersa in Cape Corso, and the manganese mine near Alesani.
On the other hand, Corsica is an inexhaustible treasury of the rarest and most valuable stones, an elysium of the geologist. But they lie unused; no one digs the treasure.
It may not be out of place here to give a detail of these beautiful stones, arranged in the usual geological order.
1. Granites.—Red granite, resembling the Oriental granite, between Orto and the lake of Ereno; coral-red granite at Olmiccia; rose-red granite at Cargese; red granite, tending to purple, at Aitone; rosy granite of Carbuccia; rosy granite of Porto; rose-red granite at Algajola; granite with garnets (the bigness of a nut) at Vizzavona.
2. Porphyries.—Variegated porphyry in Niolo; black porphyry with rosy spots at Porto Vecchio; pale yellow porphyry, with rosy felspar at Porto Vecchio; grayish green porphyry, with amethyst, on the Restonica.
3. Serpentines.—Green, very hard serpentines; also transparent serpentines at Corte, Matra, and Bastia.
4. Eurites, amphibolites, and euphotides; globular eurite at Curso and Girolata, in Niolo, and elsewhere; globular amphibolite, commonly termed orbicular granite (the nodules consist of felspar and amphiboles in concentric layers) in isolated blocks at Sollucaro, on the Taravo, in the valley of Campolaggio and elsewhere; amphibolite, with crystals of black hornblende in white felspar at Olmeto, Levie, and Mela; euphotides, called also Verde of Corsica, and Verde d'Orezza, in the bed of the Fiumalto, and in the valley of Bevinco.
5. Jasper and Agates.—Jasper (in granites and porphyries) in Niolo, and the valley of Stagno; agates (also in the granites and porphyries) in the same localities.
6. Marble and Alabaster.—White statuary marble of dazzling splendour at Ortiporio, Casacconi, Borgo de Cavignano, and elsewhere; bluish gray marble at Corte; yellow alabaster in the valley of S. Lucia, near Bastia; white alabaster, semi-transparent, foliated and fibrous, in a grotto behind Tuara, in the gulf of Girolata.
CHAPTER V.
A SECOND LESSON, THE VEGETATION OF CORSICA.
It was an instructive lesson that Francesco Marmocchi, quondam professor of natural history, quondam minister of Tuscany, now Fuoruscito, and poor solitary student, gave me, that rosiest of all morning hours as we stood high up on the green Mount Cardo, the fair Mediterranean extended at our feet, exactly of such a colour as Dante has described: color del Oriental zaffiro.
"See," said Marmocchi, "where the blue outline shows itself, yonder is the beautiful Toscana."
Ah, I see Toscana well; plainly I see fair Florence, and the halls where the statues of the great Tuscans stand, Giotto, Orcagna, Nicola Pisano, Dante, Petrarca, Boccacio, Macchiavelli, Galilei, and the godlike Michael Angelo; three thousand Croats—I can see them—are parading there among the statues; the air is so clear, you can see and hear everything: listen, Francesco, to the verses the marble Michael Angelo is now addressing to Dante:—
"Dear is to me my sleep, and that I am of stone;
While this wo lasts, this ignominy deep,
To see nought, and to hear nought, that alone
Is well; then wake me not, speak low, and weep!"
But do you see how this dry brown rock has decorated himself over and over with flowers? On his head he wears a glorious plume of myrtles, white with blossom, and his breast is wound with a threefold cord of honour; with ivy, bramble, and the white wild vine—the clematis. There are no fairer garlands than those wreaths of clematis with their clusters of white blossom, and delicate leaves; the ancients loved them well, and willingly in lyric hours wore them round their heads.
Within the compass of a few paces, what a profusion of different plants! Here are rosemary and cytisus, there wild asparagus, beside it a tall bush of lilac-blossomed erica; here again the poisonous euphorbia, which sheds a milk-white juice when you break it; and here the sympathetic helianthemum, with its beautiful golden flowers, which one by one all fall off when you have broken a single twig; yonder, outlandish and bizarre, stands the prickly cactus, like a Moorish heathen, near it the wild olive shrub, the cork-oak, the lentiscus, the wild fig, and at their roots bloom the well-known children of our northern homes—the scabiosa, the geranium, and the mallow. How exquisite, pungent, invigorating are the perfumes that all this blooming vegetation breathes forth; the rue there, the lavender, the mint, and all those labiatae. Did not Napoleon say on St. Helena, as his mournful thoughts turned again to his native island: "All was better there, to the very smell of the soil; with shut eyes I should know Corsica from its fragrance alone."
Let us hear something from Marmocchi now, on the botany of Corsica in general.
Corsica is the most central region of the great plant-system of the Mediterranean—a system characterized by a profusion of fragrant Labiatæ and graceful Caryophylleæ. These plants cover all parts of the island, and at all seasons of the year fill the air with their perfume.
On account of the central position of Corsica, its vegetation connects itself with that of all the other provinces of the immense botanic region referred to; through Cape Corso it is connected with the plants of Liguria, through the east coast with those of Tuscany and Rome, through the west and south coasts with the botany of Provence, Spain, Barbary, Sicily, and the East; and finally, through the mountainous and lofty region of the interior, with that of the Alps and Pyrenees. What a wondrous opulence, and astonishing variety, therefore, in the Corsican vegetation!—a variety and opulence that infinitely heightens the beauty of the various regions of this island, already rendered so picturesque by their geological configuration.
Some of the forests, on the slopes of the mountains, are as beautiful as the finest in Europe—particularly those of Aitone and Vizzavona; besides, many provinces of Corsica are covered with boundless groves of chestnuts, the trees in which are as large and fruitful as the finest on the Apennines or Etna. Plantations of olives, from their extent entitled to be called forests, clothe the eminences, and line the valleys that run towards the sea, or lie open to its influences. Even on the rude sides of the higher mountains, the grape-vine twines itself round the orchard-fences, and spreads to the view its green leaves and purple fruit. Fertile plains, golden with rich harvests, stretch along the coasts of the island, and wheat and rye enliven the hillsides, here and there, with their fresh green, which contrasts agreeably with the dark verdure of the copsewoods, and the cold tones of the naked rock.
The maple and walnut, like the chestnut, thrive in the valleys and on the heights of Corsica; the cypress and the sea-pine prefer the less elevated regions; the forests are full of cork oaks and evergreen oaks; the arbutus and the myrtle grow to the size of trees. Pomaceous trees, but particularly the wild olive, cover wide tracts on the heights. The evergreen thorn, and the broom of Spain and Corsica, mingle with heaths in manifold variety, and all equally beautiful; among these may be distinguished the erica arborea, which frequently reaches an uncommon height.
On the tracts which are watered by the overflowing of streams and brooks, grow the broom of Etna, with its beautiful golden-yellow blossoms, the cisti, the lentisks, the terebinths, everywhere where the hand of man has not touched the soil. Further down, towards the plains, there is no hollow or valley which is not hung with the rhododendron, whose twigs, towards the sea-coast, entwine with those of the tamarisk.
The fan-palm grows on the rocks by the shore, and the date-palm, probably introduced from Africa, on the most sheltered spots of the coast. The cactus opuntia and the American agave grow everywhere in places that are warm, rocky, and dry.
What shall I say of the magnificent cotyledons, of the beautiful papilionaceous plants, of the large verbasceæ, the glorious purple digitalis, that deck the mountains of the island? And of the mallows, the orchises, the liliaceæ, the solanaceæ, the centaurea, and the thistles—plants which so beautifully adorn the sunny and exposed, or cool and shady regions where their natural affinities allow them to grow?
The fig, the pomegranate, the vine, yield good fruit in Corsica, even where the husbandman neglects them, and the climate and soil of the coasts of this beautiful island are so favourable to the lemon and the orange, and the other trees of the same family, that they literally form forests.
The almond, the cherry, the plum, the apple-tree, the pear tree, the peach, and the apricot, and, in general, all the fruit trees of Europe, are here common. In the hottest districts of the island, the fruits of the St. John's bread-tree, the medlar of various kinds, the jujube tree, reach complete ripeness.
The hand of man, if man were willing, might introduce in the proper quarters, and without much trouble, the sugar-cane, the cotton plant, tobacco, the pine-apple, madder, and even indigo, with success. In a word, Corsica might become for France a little Indies in the Mediterranean.
This singularly magnificent vegetation of the island is favoured by the climate. The Corsican climate has three distinct zones of temperature, graduated according to the elevation of the soil. The first climatic zone rises from the level of the sea to the height of five hundred and eighty metres (1903 English feet); the second, from the line of the former, to the height of one thousand nine hundred and fifty metres (6398 feet); the third, to the summit of the mountains.
The first zone or region of the coast is warm, like the parallel tracts of Italy and Spain. Its year has properly only two seasons, spring and summer; seldom does the thermometer fall 1° or 2° below zero of Reaumur (27° or 28° Fah.); and when it does so, it is only for a few hours. All along the coast, the sun is warm even in January, the nights and the shade cool, and this at all seasons of the year. The sky is clouded only during short intervals; the heavy sirocco alone, from the south-east, brings lingering vapours, till the vehement south-west—the libeccio, again dispels them. The moderate cold of January is rapidly followed by a dog-day heat of eight months, and the temperature mounts from 8° to 18° of Reaumur (50° to 72° Fah.), and even to 26° (90° Fah.) in the shade. It is, then, a misfortune for the vegetation, if no rain falls in March or April—and this misfortune occurs often; but the Corsican trees have, in general, hard and tough leaves, which withstand the drought, as the oleander, the myrtle, the cistus, the lentiscus, the wild olive. In Corsica, as in all warm climates, the moist and shady regions are almost pestilential; you cannot walk in these in the evening without contracting long and severe fever, which, unless an entire change of air intervene, will end in dropsy and death.
The second climatic zone resembles the climate of France, more especially that of Burgundy, Morvan, and Bretagne. Here the snow, which generally appears in November, lasts sometimes twenty days; but, singularly enough, up to a height of one thousand one hundred and sixty metres (3706 feet), it does no harm to the olive; but, on the contrary, increases its fruitfulness. The chestnut seems to be the tree proper to this zone, as it ceases at the elevation of one thousand nine hundred and fifty metres (6398 feet), giving place to the evergreen oaks, firs, beeches, box-trees, and junipers. In this climate, too, live most of the Corsicans in scattered villages on mountain slopes and in valleys.
The third climate is cold and stormy, like that of Norway, during eight months of the year. The only inhabited parts are the district of Niolo, and the two forts of Vivario and Vizzavona. Above these inhabited spots no vegetation meets the eye but the firs that hang on the gray rocks. There the vulture and the wild-sheep dwell, and there are the storehouse and cradle of the many streams that pour downwards into the valleys and plains.
Corsica may therefore be considered as a pyramid with three horizontal gradations, the lowermost of which is warm and moist, the uppermost cold and dry, while the intermediate shares the qualities of both.
CHAPTER VI.
LEARNED MEN.
If we reflect on the number of great men that Corsica has produced within the space of scarcely a hundred years, we cannot but be astonished that an island so small, and so thinly populated, is yet so rich in extraordinary minds. Its statesmen and generals are of European note; and if it has not been so fruitful in scientific talent, this is a consequence of its nature as an island, and of its iron history.
But even scientific talent of no mean grade has of late years been active in Corsica, and names like Pompei, Renucci, Savelli, Rafaelli, Giubeja, Salvatore Viali, Caraffa, Gregori, are an honour to the island. The men of most powerful intellect among these belong to the legal profession. They have distinguished themselves particularly in jurisprudence, and as historians of their own country.
A man the most remarkable and meritorious of them all, and whose memory will not soon die in Corsica, was Giovanni Carlo Gregori. He was born in Bastia in 1797, and belonged to one of the best families in the island. Devoting himself to the study of law, he first became auditor in Bastia, afterwards judge in Ajaccio, councillor at the king's court in Riom, then at the appeal court in Lyons, where he was also active as president of the Academy of Sciences, and where, on the 27th of May 1852, he died. He has written important treatises on Roman jurisprudence; but he had a patriotic passion for the history of his native country, and with this he was unceasingly occupied. He had resolved to write a history of Corsica, had made detailed researches, and collected the necessary materials for it; but death overtook him, and the loss of his work to Corsica cannot be sufficiently lamented. Nevertheless, Gregori has done important service to his native country: he edited the new edition of the national historian Filippini, a continuation of whose work it had been his purpose to write; he also edited the Corsican history of Petrus Cyrnæus; and in the year 1843 he published a highly important work—the Statutes of Corsica. In his earlier years he had written a Corsican tragedy, with Sampiero for a hero, which I have not seen.
Gregori maintained a most lively literary connexion with Italy and Germany. His acquirements were unusually extended, and his activity of the genuine Corsican stubbornness. Among his posthumous manuscripts are a part of his History of Corsica, and rich materials for a history of the commerce of the naval powers. The death of Gregori filled not only Corsica, but the men of science in France and Italy, with deep sorrow.
He and Renucci also rendered good service to the public library of Bastia, which contains sixteen thousand volumes, and occupies a large building formerly belonging to the Jesuits. They may be said, in fact, to have made this library, which ranks with that of Ajaccio as second in the island. Science in Corsica is still, on the whole, in its infancy. As the historian Filippini, the contemporary of Sampiero, complains,—indolence, the mainly warlike bent given to the nature of the Corsicans by their perpetual struggles, and the consequent ignorance, entirely prevented the formation of a literature. But it is remarkable, that in the year 1650 the Corsicans founded an Academy of Sciences, the first president of which was Geronimo Biguglia, the poet, advocate, theologian, and historian. It is well known that people in those times were fond of giving such academies the most whimsical names; the Corsicans called theirs the Academy dei Vagabondi (of the Vagabonds), and a more admirable and fitting appellation they could not at that period have selected. The Marquis of Cursay, whose memory is still affectionately cherished by the Corsicans, restored this Academy; and Rousseau, himself entitled to the name of Vagabond from his wandering life, wrote a little treatise for this Corsican institution on the question: "Which is the most necessary virtue for heroes, and what heroes have been deficient in this virtue?"—a genuinely Corsican subject.
The educational establishments—the Academy just referred to has been dissolved—are, in Bastia, as in Corsica in general, extremely inadequate. Bastia has a Lyceum, and some lower schools. I was present at a distribution of prizes in the highest of the girls' schools. It took place in the court of the old college of the Jesuits, which was prettily decorated, and in the evening brilliantly illuminated. The girls, all in white, sat in rows before the principal citizens and magistrates of the town, and received bay-wreaths—those who had won them. The head mistress called the name of the happy victress, who thereupon went up to her desk and received the wreath, which she then brought to one of the leading men of the town, silently conferring on him the favour of crowning her, which ceremony was then gone through in due form. Innumerable such bay-wreaths were distributed; and many a pretty child bore away perhaps ten or twelve of them for her immortal works, receiving them all very gracefully. It seemed to me, however, that wealthy parents, or celebrated old families, were too much flattered; and they never ceased crowning Miss Colonna d'Istria, Miss Abatucci, Miss Saliceti—so that these young ladies carried more bays home with them than would serve to crown the immortal poets of a century. The graceful little festival—in which there was certainly too much French flattering of vanity—was closed by a play, very cleverly acted by the young ladies.
Bastia has a single newspaper—L'Ere Nouvelle, Journal de la Corse—which appears only on Fridays. Up till this summer, the advocate Arrighi, a man of talent, was the editor. The new Prefect of Corsica, described to me as a young official without experience, exceedingly anxious to bring himself into notice, like the Roman prefects of old in their provinces, had been constantly finding fault with the Corsican press, the most innocent in the world; and threatening, on the most trifling pretexts, to withdraw the Government permission to publish the paper in question, till at length M. Arrighi was compelled to retire. The paper, entirely Bonapartist in its politics, still exists; the only other journal in Corsica is the Government paper in Ajaccio.
There are three bookselling establishments in Bastia, among which the Libreria Fabiani would do honour even to a German city. This house has published some beautiful works.
CHAPTER VII.
CORSICAN STATISTICS—RELATION OF CORSICA TO FRANCE.
In the Bastian Journal for July 16, 1852, I found the statistics of Corsica according to calculations made in 1851, and shall here communicate them. Inhabitants
| In 1740, | 120,380 |
| 1760, | 130,000 |
| 1790, | 150,638 |
| 1821, | 180,348 |
| 1827, | 185,079 |
| 1831, | 197,967 |
| 1836, | 207,889 |
| 1841, | 221,463 |
| 1846, | 230,271 |
| 1851, | 236,251 |
The population of the several arrondissements, five in number, was as follows:—In the arrondissement of Ajaccio, 55,008; Bastia, 20,288; Calvi, 24,390; Corte, 56,830; Sartene, 29,735.[B]
Corsica is divided into sixty-one cantons, 355 communes; contains 30,438 houses, and 50,985 households.
| Males. | |
| Unmarried, | 75,543 |
| Married, | 36,715 |
| Widowers, | 5,680 |
| 117,938 | |
| Females. | |
| Unmarried, | 68,229 |
| Married, | 36,916 |
| Widows, | 13,168 |
| 118,313 | |
236,187 of the inhabitants are Roman Catholics, fifty-four Reformed Christians. The French born on the island, i.e., the Corsicans included, are 231,653:—Naturalized French, 353; Germans, 41; English, 12; Dutch, 6; Spaniards, 7; Italians, 3806; Poles, 12; Swiss, 85; other foreigners, 285.
Of diseased people, there were in the year 1851, 2554; of these 435 were blind in both eyes, 568 in one eye; 344 deaf and dumb; 183 insane; 176 club-footed.
Occupation—32,364 men and women were owners of land; 34,427 were day-labourers; 6924 domestics; people in trades connected with building—masons, carpenters, painters, blacksmiths, &c., 3194; dealers in wrought goods, and tailors, 4517; victual-dealers, 2981; drivers of vehicles, 1623; dealers in articles of luxury—watchmakers, goldsmiths, engravers, &c., 55; monied people living on their incomes, 13,160; government officials, 1229; communal magistrates, 803; military and marinari, 5627; apothecaries and physicians, 311; clergy, 955; advocates, 200; teachers, 635; artists, 105; littérateurs, 51; prostitutes, 91; vagabonds and beggars, 688; sick in hospital, 85.
One class, and that the most original class in the island, has no figure assigned to it in the above list—I mean the herdsmen. The number of bandits is stated to be 200; and there may be as many Corsican bandits in Sardinia.
That the reader may be able to form a clear idea of the general administration of Corsica, I shall here furnish briefly its more important details.
Corsica has been a department since the year 1811. It is governed by a prefect, who resides in Ajaccio. He also discharges the functions of sub-prefect for the arrondissement of Ajaccio. He has four sub-prefects under him in the other four arrondissements. The prefect is assisted by the Council of the prefecture, consisting of three members, besides the prefect as president, and deciding on claims of exemption, &c., in connexion with taxes, the public works, the communal and national estates. There is an appeal to the Council of State.
The General Council, the members of which are elected by the voters of each canton, assembles yearly in Ajaccio to deliberate on the public affairs of the nation. It is competent to regulate the distribution of the direct taxes over the arrondissements. The General Council can only meet by a decree of the supreme head of the state, who determines the length of the sitting. There is a representative for each canton, in all, therefore, there are sixty-one.
In the chief town of each arrondissement meets a provincial council of as many members as there are cantons in the arrondissement. The citizens who, according to French law, are entitled to vote, are also voters for the Legislative Assembly. There are about 50,000 voters in Corsica.
Mayors, with adjuncts named by the prefect, conduct the affairs of the communes; the people have retained so much of their democratic rights, that they are allowed to elect the municipal council over which the mayor presides.
As regards the administration of justice, the high court of the department is the Appeal Court of Bastia, which consists of one chief president, two présidents de chambre, seventeen councillors, one auditor, one procurator-general, two advocates-general, one substitute, five clerks of court.
The Court of Assize holds its sittings in Bastia, and consists of three appeal-councillors, the procurator-general, and a clerk of court. It sits usually once every four months. There is a Tribunal of First Instance in the principal town of each arrondissement. There is also in each canton a justice of the peace. Each commune has a tribunal of simple municipal police, consisting of the mayor and his adjuncts.
The ecclesiastical administration is subject to the diocese of Ajaccio, the bishop of which—the only one in Corsica—is a suffragan of the Archbishop of Aix.
Corsica forms the seventeenth military division of France. Its head-quarters are in Bastia, where the general of the division resides. The gendarmerie, so important for Corsica, forms the seventeenth legion, and is also stationed in Bastia. It is composed of four companies, with four chefs, sixteen lieutenancies, and one hundred and two brigades.
I add a few particulars in regard to agriculture and industrial affairs. Agriculture, the foundation of all national wealth, is very low in Corsica. This is very evident from the single fact, that the cultivated lands of the island amount to a trifle more than three-tenths of the surface. The exact area of the island is 874,741 hectars.[C] The progress of agriculture is infinitely retarded by family feuds, bandit-life, the community of land in the parishes, the want of roads, the great distance of the tilled grounds from the dwellings, the unwholesome atmosphere of the plains, and most of all by the Corsican indolence.
Native industry is in a very languishing state. It is confined to the merest necessaries—the articles indispensable to the common handicrafts, and to sustenance; the women almost everywhere wear the coarse brown Corsican cloth (panno Corso), called also pelvue; the herdsmen prepare cheese, and a sort of cheesecake, called broccio; the only saltworks are in the Gulf of Porto Vecchio. There are anchovy, tunny, and coral fisheries on many parts of the coast, but they are not diligently pursued.
The commerce of Corsica is equally trifling. The principle export is oil, which the island yields so abundantly, that with more cultivation it might produce to the value of sixty millions of francs; it also exports pulse, chestnuts, fish, fresh and salted, wood, dyeing plants, hides, corals, marble, a considerable amount of manufactured tobacco, especially cigars, for which the leaf is imported. The main imports are—grain of various kinds, as rye, wheat, and rice; sugar, coffee, cattle, cotton, lint, leather, wrought and unwrought iron, brick, glass, stoneware.
The export and import are grievously disproportionate. The Customs impose ruinous restrictions on all manufacture and all commerce; they hinder foreigners from exchanging their produce for the produce of the country; hence the Corsicans must pay tenfold for their commodities in France, while even wine is imported from Provence free of duty, and thus checks the native cultivation of the vine. For Corsica is, in point of fact, precluded from exporting wine to France; France herself being a productive wine country. Even meal and vegetables are sent to the troops from Provence. The export of tobacco to the Continent is forbidden.[D] The tyrannical customs-regulations press with uncommon severity on the poor island; and though she is compelled to purchase articles from France to the value of three millions yearly, she sends into France herself only a million and a half. And Corsica yields the exchequer yearly 1,150,000 francs.
Bastia, Ajaccio, Isola Rossa, and Bonifazio are the principal trading towns.
But however melancholy the condition of Corsica may be in an industrial and a commercial point of view, its limited population protects it at least from the scourge of pauperism, which, in the opulent and cultivated countries of the Continent, can show mysteries of a much more frightful character than those of bandit-life and the Vendetta.
For five-and-twenty years now, with unimportant interruptions, have the French been in possession of the island of Corsica; and they have neither succeeded in healing the ever open wound of the Corsican people, nor have they, with all the means that advanced culture places at their disposal, done anything for the country, beyond introducing a few very trifling improvements. The island that has twice given France her Emperor, and twice dictated her laws, has gained nothing by it but the satisfaction of her revenge. The Corsican will never forget the disgraceful way in which France appropriated his country; and a high-spirited people never learns to love its conquerors. When I heard the Corsicans, even of the present day, bitterly inveighing against Genoa, I said to them—"Leave the old Republic of Genoa alone; you have had your full Vendetta on her—Napoleon, a Corsican, annihilated her; France betrayed you, and bereft you of your nationality; you have had your full Vendetta on France, for you sent her your Corsican Napoleon, who enslaved her; and even now this great France is a Corsican conquest, and your own province."
Two emperors, two Corsicans, on the throne of France, bowing her down with despotic violence;—well, if an ideal conception can have the worth of reality, then we are compelled to say, never was a brave subjugated people more splendidly avenged on its subduers. The name of Napoleon, it may be confidently affirmed, is the only tie that binds the Corsican nation to France; without this its relation to France would be in no respect different from that of other conquered countries to their foreign masters. I have read, in many authors, the assertion that the Corsican nation is at the core of its heart French. I hold this assertion to be a mistake, or an intentional falsehood. I have never seen the least ground for it. The difference between Corsican and Frenchman in nationality, in the most fundamental elements of character and feeling, puts a deep gulf between the two. The Corsican is decidedly an Italian; his language is acknowledged to be one of the purest dialects of Italian, his nature, his soil, his history, still link the lost son to his old mother-country. The French feel themselves strange in the island, and both soldiers and officials consider their period of service there as a "dreary exile in the isle of goats." The Corsican does not even understand such a temperament as the French—for he is grave, taciturn, chaste, consistent, thoroughly a man, and steadfast as the granite of his country.
Corsican patriotism is not extinct. I saw it now and then burst out. The old grudge still stirs the bosom of the Corsican, when he remembers the battle of Ponte Nuovo. Travelling one day, in a public conveyance, over the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo, a Corsican sitting beside me, a man from the interior, pulled me vehemently by the arm, as we came in sight of the famous bridge, and cried, with a passionate gesture—"This is the spot where the Genoese murdered our freedom—I mean the French." The reader will understand this, when he remembers that the name of Genoese means the same as deadly foe; for hatred of Genoa, the Corsicans themselves say, is with them undying. Another time I asked a Corsican, a man of education, if he was an Italian. "Yes," said he, "for I am a Corsican." I understood him well, and reached him my hand. These are isolated occurrences—accidents, but frequently a living word, caught from the mouth of the people, throws a vivid light on its state of feeling, and suddenly reveals the truth that does not stand in books compiled by officials.
I have heard it said again and again, and in all parts of the country—"We Corsicans would gladly be Italian—for we are in reality Italians, if Italy were only united and strong; as she is at present, we must be French, for we need the support of a great power; by ourselves we are too poor."
The Government does all it can to dislodge the Italian language, and replace it with the French. All educated Corsicans speak French, and, it is said, well; fashion, necessity, the prospect of office, force it upon many. Sorry I was to meet Corsicans (they were always young men) who spoke French with each other evidently out of mere vanity. I could not refrain on such occasions from expressing my astonishment that they so thoughtlessly relinquished their beautiful native tongue for that of the French. In the cities French is much spoken, but the common people speak nothing but Italian, even when they have learned French at school, or by intercourse with Frenchmen. French has not at all penetrated into the mountainous districts of the interior, where the ancient, venerated customs of the elder Corsicans—their primitive innocence, single-heartedness, justice, generosity, and love of liberty—remain unimpaired. Sad were it for the noble Corsican people if they should one day exchange the virtues of their rude but great forefathers for the refined corruption of enervated Parisian society. The moral rottenness of society in France has robbed the French nation of its strength. It has stolen like an infection into society in other countries, deepened their demoralization, and made incapacity for action general. It has disturbed the hallowed foundation of all human society—the family relation. But a people is ripe for despotism that has lost the spirit of family. The whole heroic history of the Corsicans has its source in the natural law of the inviolability and sacredness of the family relation, and in that alone; even their free constitution which they gave themselves in the course of years, and completed under Paoli, is but a development of the family. All the virtues of the Corsicans spring from this spirit; even the frightful night-sides of their present condition, such as the Vendetta, belong to the same root.
We look with shuddering on the avenger of blood, who descends from his mountain haunts, to stab his foe's kindred, man by man; yet this bloody vampire may, in manly vigour, in generosity, and in patriotism, be a very hero compared with such bloodless, sneaking villains, as are to be found contaminating with their insidious presence the great society of our civilisation, and secretly sucking out the souls of their fellow-men.
CHAPTER VIII.
BRACCIAMOZZO, THE BANDIT.
"Che bello onor s'acquista in far Vendetta."—Dante.
The second day after my arrival in Bastia, I was awakened during the night by an appalling noise in my locanda, in the street of the Jesuits. It was as if the Lapithæ and Centaurs had got together by the ears. I spring to the door, and witness, in the salle-à-manger, the following scene:—Mine host infuriated and vociferating at the pitch of his voice—his firelock levelled at a man who lies before him on his knees, other people vociferating, interfering, and trying to calm him down; the man on his knees implores mercy: they put him out of the house. It was a young man who had given himself out in the locanda for a Marseillese, had played the fine gentleman, and, in the end, could not pay his bill.
The second day after this, I happened to cross early in the morning the Place San Nicolao, the public promenade of the Bastinese, on my way to bathe. The executioners were just erecting a guillotine beside the town-house, though not in the centre of the Place, still on the promenade itself. Carabineers and a crowd of people surrounded the shocking scene, to which the laughing sea and the peaceful olive-groves formed a contrast painfully impressive. The atmosphere was close and heavy with the sirocco. Sailors and workmen stood in groups on the quay, silently smoking their little chalk-pipes, and gazing at the red scaffold, and not a few of them, in the pointed barretto, brown jacket, hanging half off, half on; their broad breasts bare, red handkerchiefs carelessly knotted about their necks, looked as if they had more to do with the guillotine than merely to stare at it. And, in fact, there probably was not one among the crowd who was not likely to meet with the same fate, if accident but willed it, that the hallowed custom of the Vendetta should stain his band with murder, and murder should force him to the life of the bandit.
"Who is it they are going to execute?"
"Bracciamozzo (Stump-arm). He is only three-and-twenty. The sbirri caught him in the mountains; but he defended himself like a devil—they shot him in the arm—the arm was taken off, and it healed."
"What has he done?"
"Dio mio!—he has killed ten men!"
"Ten men! and for what?"
"Out of capriccio."
I hastened into the sea to refresh myself with a bath, and then back into my locanda, in order to see no more of what passed. I was horror-struck at what I had heard and seen, and a shuddering came over me in this wild solitude. I took out my Dante; I felt as if I must read some of his wild phantasies in the Inferno, where the pitch-devils thrust the doomed souls down with harpoons as often as they rise for a mouthful of air. My locanda lay in the narrow and gloomy street of the Jesuits. An hour had elapsed, when a confused hum, and the trample of horses' feet brought me to the window—they were leading Bracciamozzo past, accompanied by the monks called the Brothers of Death, in their hooded capotes, that leave nothing of the face free but the eyes, which gleam spectrally out through the openings left for them—veritable demon-shapes, muttering in low hollow tones to themselves, horrible, as if they had sprung from Dante's Hell into reality. The bandit walked with a firm step between two priests, one of whom held a crucifix before him. He was a young man of middle size, with beautiful bronze features and raven-black curly hair, his face pale, and the pallor heightened by a fine moustache. His left arm was bound behind his back, the other was broken off near the shoulder. His eye, fiery no doubt as a tiger's, when the murderous lust for blood tingled through his veins, was still and calm. He seemed to be murmuring prayers. His pace was steady, and his bearing upright. Gendarmes rode at the head of the procession with drawn swords; behind the bandit, the Brothers of Death walked in pairs; the black coffin came last of all—a cross and a death's-head rudely painted on it in white. It was borne by four Brothers of Mercy. Slowly the procession moved along the street of the Jesuits, followed by the murmuring crowd; and thus they led the vampire with the broken wing to the scaffold. My eyes have never lighted on a scene more horrible, seldom on one whose slightest details have so daguerreotyped themselves in my memory.
I was told afterwards that the bandit died without flinching, and that his last words were: "I pray God and the world for forgiveness, for I acknowledge that I have done much evil."
This young man, people said to me, had not become a murderer from personal reasons of revenge, that is, in order to fulfil a Vendetta; he had become a bandit from ambition. His story throws a great deal of light on the frightful state of matters in the island. When Massoni was at the height of his fame [this man had avenged the blood of a relation, and then become bandit], Bracciamozzo, as the people began to call the young Giacomino, after his arm had been mutilated, carried him the means of sustenance: for these bandits have always an understanding with friends and with goat-herds, who bring them food in their lurking-places, and receive payment when the outlaws have money. Giacomino, intoxicated with the renown of the bold bandit Massoni, took it into his head to follow his example, and become the admiration of all Corsica. So he killed a man, took to the bush, and was a bandit. By and bye he had killed ten men, and the people called him Vecchio—the old one, probably because, though still quite young, he had already shed as much blood as an old bandit. One day Vecchio shot the universally esteemed physician Malaspina, uncle of a hospitable entertainer of my own, a gentleman of Balagna; he concealed himself in some brushwood, and fired right into the diligenza as it passed along the road from Bastia. The mad devil then sprang back into the mountains, where at length justice overtook him.
A career of this frightful description, then, is possible for a man in Corsica. Nobody there despises the bandit; he is neither thief nor robber, but only fighter, avenger, and free as the eagle on the hills. Hot-headed youths are fired with the thought of winning fame by daring deeds of arms, and of living in the ballads of the people. The inflammable temperament of these men—who have been tamed by no culture, who shun labour as a disgrace, and, thirsting for action, know nothing of the world but the wild mountains among which Nature has cooped them up within their sea-girt island—seems, like a volcano, to insist on vent. On another, wider field, and under other conditions, the same men who house for years in caverns, and fight with sbirri in the bush, would become great soldiers like Sampiero and Gaffori. The nature of the Corsicans is the combative nature; and I can find no more fitting epithet for them than that which Plato applies to the race of men who are born for war, namely, "impassioned."[E] The Corsicans are impassioned natures; passionate in their jealousy and in their pursuit of fame; passionately quick in honour, passionately prone to revenge. Glowing with all this fiery impetuosity, they are the born soldiers that Plato requires.
After Bracciamozzo's execution, I was curious to see whether the beau monde of Bastia would promenade as usual on the Place San Nicolao in the evening, and I did not omit walking in that direction. And lo! there they were, moving up and down on the Place Nicolao, where in the morning bandit blood had flowed—the fair dames of Bastia. Nothing now betrayed the scene of the morning; it was as if nothing had happened. I also wandered there; the colouring of the sea was magically beautiful. The fishing-skiffs floated on it with their twinkling lights, and the fishermen sang their beautiful song, O pescator dell' onda.
In Corsica they have nerves of granite, and no smelling-bottles.
CHAPTER IX.
THE VENDETTA, OR REVENGE TO THE DEATH.
"Eterna faremo Vendetta."—Corsican Ballad.
The origin of the bandit life is to be sought almost exclusively in the ancient custom of the Vendetta, that is, of exacting blood for blood. Almost all writers on this subject, whom I have read, state that the Vendetta began to be practised in the times when Genoese justice was venal, or favoured murder. Without doubt, the constant wars, and defective administration of justice greatly contributed to the evil, and allowed the barbarous custom to become inveterate, but its root lies elsewhere. For the law of blood for blood does not prevail in Corsica only, it exists also in other countries—in Sardinia, in Calabria, in Sicily, among the Albanians and Montenegrins, among the Circassians, Druses, Bedouins, &c.
Like phenomena must arise under like conditions; and these are not far to seek, for the social condition of all these peoples is similar. They all lead a warlike and primitive life; nature around them is wild and impressive; they are all, with the exception of the Bedouins, poor mountaineers inhabiting regions not easily accessible to culture, and clinging, with the utmost obstinacy, to their primitive condition and ancient barbarous customs; further, they are all equally penetrated with the same intense family sympathies, and these form the sacred basis of such social life as they possess. In a state of nature, and in a society rent asunder by prevailing war and insecurity, the family becomes a state in itself; its members cleave fast to each other; if one is injured, the entire little state is wronged. The family exercises justice only through itself, and the form this exercise of justice takes, is revenge. And thus it appears that the law of blood for blood, though barbarous, still springs from the injured sense of justice, and the natural affection of blood-relations, and that its source is a noble one—the human heart. The Vendetta is barbarian justice. Now the high sense of justice characterizing the Corsicans is acknowledged and eulogized even by the authors of antiquity.
Two noble and great passions have, all along, swayed the the Corsican mind—the love of family and the love of country. In the case of a quite poor people, living in a sequestered island—an island, moreover, mountainous, rugged, and stern—these passions could not but be intense, for to that nation they were all the world. Love of country produced that heroic history of Corsica which we know, and which is in reality nothing but an inveterate Vendetta against Genoa, handed down for ages from father to son; and love of family has produced the no less bloody, and no less heroic history of the Vendetta, the tragedy of which is not yet played to an end. The exhaustless native energy of this little people is really something inconceivable, since, while rending itself to pieces in a manner the most sanguinary, it, at the same time, possessed the strength to maintain so interminable and so glorious a struggle with its external foes.
The love of his friends is still to the Corsican what it was in the old heroic times—a religion; only the love of his country is with him a higher duty. Many examples from Corsican history show this. As among the ancient Hellenes, fraternal love ranked as love's highest and purest form, so it is ranked among the Corsicans. In Corsica, the fraternal relation is viewed as the holiest of all relations, and the names of brother and sister indicate the purest happiness the heart can have—its noblest treasure, or its saddest loss. The eldest brother, as the stay of the family, is revered simply in his character as such. I believe nothing expresses so fully the range of feeling, and the moral nature of a people, as its songs. Now the Corsican song is strictly a dirge, which is at the same time a song of revenge; and most of these songs of revenge are dirges of the sister for her brother who has fallen. I have always found in this poetry that where-ever all love and all laudation are heaped upon the dead, it is said of him, He was my brother. Even the wife, when giving the highest expression to her love, calls her husband, brother. I was astonished to find precisely the same modes of expression and feeling in the Servian popular poetry; with the Servian woman, too, the most endearing name for her husband is brother, and the most sacred oath among the Servians is when a man swears by his brother. Among unsophisticated nations, the natural religion of the heart is preserved in their most ordinary sentiments and relations—for these have their ground in that which alone is lasting in the circumstances of human life; the feeling of a people cleaves to what is simple and enduring. Fraternal love and filial love express the simplest and most enduring relations on earth, for they are relations without passion. And the history of human wo begins with Cain the fratricide.
Wo, therefore, to him who has slain the Corsican's brother or blood-relation! The deed is done; the murderer flees from a double dread—of justice, which punishes murder; and of the kindred of the slain, who avenge murder. For as soon as the deed has become known, the relations of the fallen man take their weapons, and hasten to find the murderer. The murderer has escaped to the woods; he climbs perhaps to the perpetual snow, and lives there with the wild sheep: all trace of him is lost. But the murderer has relatives—brothers, cousins, a father; these relatives know that they must answer for the deed with their lives. They arm themselves, therefore, and are upon their guard. The life of those who are thus involved in a Vendetta is most wretched. He who has to fear the Vendetta instantly shuts himself up in his house, and barricades door and window, in which he leaves only loop-holes. The windows are lined with straw and with mattresses; and this is called inceppar le fenestre. The Corsican house among the mountains, in itself high, almost like a tower, narrow, with a high stone stair, is easily turned into a fortress. Intrenched within it, the Corsican keeps close, always on his guard lest a ball reach him through the window. His relatives go armed to their labour in the field, and station sentinels; their lives are in danger at every step. I have been told of instances in which Corsicans did not leave their intrenched dwellings for ten, and even for fifteen years, spending all this period of their lives besieged, and in deadly fear; for Corsican revenge never sleeps, and the Corsican never forgets. Not long ago, in Ajaccio, a man who had lived for ten years in his room, and at last ventured upon the street, fell dead upon the threshold of his house as he re-entered: the ball of him who had watched him for ten years had pierced his heart.
I see, walking about here in the streets of Bastia, a man whom the people call Nasone, from his large nose. He is of gigantic size, and his repulsive features are additionally disfigured by the scar of a frightful wound in his eye. Some years ago he lived in the neighbouring village of Pietra Nera. He insulted another inhabitant of the place; this man swore revenge. Nasone intrenched himself in his house, and closed up the windows, to protect himself from balls. A considerable time passed, and one day he ventured abroad; in a moment his foe sprang upon him, a pruning-knife in his hand. They wrestled fearfully; Nasone was overpowered; and his adversary, who had already given him a blow in the neck, was on the point of hewing off his head on the stump of a tree, when some people came up. Nasone recovered; the other escaped to the macchia. Again a considerable time passed. Once more Nasone ventured into the street: a ball struck him in the eye. They raised the wounded man; and again his giant nature conquered, and healed him. The furious bandit now ravaged his enemy's vineyard during the night, and attempted to fire his house. Nasone removed to the city, and goes about there as a living example of Corsican revenge—an object of horror to the peaceable stranger who inquires his history. I saw the hideous man one day on the shore, but not without his double-barrel. His looks made my flesh creep; he was like the demon of revenge himself.
Not to take revenge is considered by the genuine Corsicans as degrading. Thirst for vengeance is with them an entirely natural sentiment—a passion that has become hallowed. In their songs, revenge has a cultus, and is celebrated as a religion of filial piety. Now, a sentiment which the poetry of a people has adopted as an essential characteristic of the nationality is ineradicable; and this in the highest degree, if woman has ennobled it as her feeling. Girls and women have composed most of the Corsican songs of revenge, and they are sung from mountain-top to shore. This creates a very atmosphere of revenge, in which the people live and the children grow up, sucking in the wild meaning of the Vendetta with their mother's milk. In one of these songs, it is said that twelve lives are insufficient to avenge the fallen man's—boots! That is Corsican. A man like Hamlet, who struggles to fill himself with the spirit of the Vendetta, and cannot do it, would be pronounced by the Corsicans the most despicable of all poltroons. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, does human blood and human life count for so little as in Corsica. The Corsican is ready to take life, but he is also ready to die.
Any one who shrinks from avenging himself—a milder disposition, perhaps, or a tincture of philosophy, giving him something of Hamlet's hesitancy—is allowed no rest by his relations, and all his acquaintances upbraid him with pusillanimity. To reproach a man for suffering an injury to remain unavenged is called rimbeccare. The old Genoese statute punished the rimbecco as incitation to murder. The law runs thus, in the nineteenth chapter of these statutes:—
"Of those who upbraid, or say rimbecco.—If any one upbraids or says rimbecco to another, because that other has not avenged the death of his father, or of his brother, or of any other blood-relation, or because he has not taken vengeance on account of other injuries and insults done upon himself, the person so upbraiding shall be fined in from twenty-five to fifty lire for each time, according to the judgment of the magistrate, and regard being had to the quality of the person, and to other circumstances; and if he does not pay forthwith, or cannot pay within eight days, then shall he be banished from the island for one year, or the corda shall be put upon him once, according to the judgment of the magistrate."
In the year 1581, the severity of the law was so far increased, that the tongue of any one saying rimbecco was publicly pierced. Now, it is especially the women who incite the men to revenge, in their dirges over the corpse of the person who has been slain, and by exhibiting the bloody shirt. The mother fastens a bloody rag of the father's shirt to the dress of her son, as a perpetual admonition to him that he has to effect vengeance. The passions of these people have a frightful, a demoniac glow.
In former times the Corsicans practised the chivalrous custom of previously proclaiming the war of the Vendetta, and also to what degree of consanguinity the vengeance was to extend. The custom has fallen into disuse. Owing to the close relationship between various families, the Vendetta, of course, crosses and recrosses from one to another, and the Vendetta that thus arises is called in Corsica, Vendetta transversale.
In intimate and perfectly natural connexion with this custom, stand the Corsican family feuds, still at the present day the scourge of the unhappy island. The families in a state of Vendetta, immediately draw into it all their relatives, and even friends; and in Corsica, as in other countries where the social condition of the population is similar, the tie of clan is very strong. Thus wars between families arise within one and the same village, or between village and village, glen and glen; and the war continues, and blood is shed for years. Vendetta, or lesser injuries—frequently the merest accidents—afford occasion, and with temperaments so passionate as those of the Corsicans, the slightest dispute may easily terminate in blood, as they all go armed. The feud extends even to the children; instances have been known in which children belonging to families at feud have stabbed and shot each other. There are in Corsica certain relations of clientship—remains of the ancient feudal system of the time of the seigniors, and this clientship prevails more especially in the country beyond the mountains, where the descendants of the old seigniors live on their estates. They have no vassals now, but dependants, friends, people in various ways bound to them. These readily band together as the adherents of the house, and are then, according to the Corsican expression, the geniali, their protectors being the patrocinatori. Thus, as in the cities of mediæval Italy, we have still in Corsica wars of families, as a last remnant of the feuds of the seigniors. The granite island has maintained an obstinate grasp on her antiquity; her warlike history and constant internal dissensions, caused by the ambition and overbearing arrogance of the seigniors, have stamped the spirit of party on the country, and till the present day it remains rampant.
In Corsica, the frightful word "enemy" has still its full old meaning. The enemy is there the deadly enemy; he who is at enmity with another, goes out to take his enemy's life, and in so doing risks his own. We, too, have brought the old expression "deadly enemy" with us from a more primitive state, but the meaning we attach to it is more abstract. Our deadly enemies have no wish to murder us—they do us harm behind our backs, they calumniate us, they injure us secretly in all possible ways, and often we do not so much as know who they are. The hatreds of civilisation have usually something mean in them; and hence, in our modern society, a man of noble feeling can no longer be an enemy—he can only despise. But deadly foes in Corsica attack the life; they have loudly and publicly sworn revenge to the death, and wherever they find each other, they stab and shoot. There is a frightful manliness in this; it shows an imposing, though savage and primitive force of character. Barbarous as such a state of society is, it nevertheless compels us to admire the natural force which it develops, especially as the Corsican avenger is frequently a really tragic individual, urged by fate, because by venerated custom, to murder. For even a noble nature can here become a Cain, and they who wander as bandits on the hills of this island, are often bearers of the curse of barbarous custom, and not of their own vileness, and may be men of virtues that would honour and signalize them in the peaceable life of a civil community.
A single passion, sprung from noble source—revenge, and nothing but revenge! it is wonderful with what irresistible might it seizes on a man. Revenge is, for the poor Corsicans, the dread goddess of Fate, who makes their history. And thus through a single passion man becomes the most frightful demon, and more merciless than the Avenging Angel himself, for he does not content himself with the first-born. Yet dark and sinister as the human form here appears, the dreadful passion, nevertheless, produces its bright contrast. Where foes are foes for life and death, friends are friends for life and death; where revenge lacerates the heart with tiger blood-thirstiness, there love is capable of resolutions the most sublime; there we find heroic forgetfulness of self, and the Divine clemency of forgiveness; and nowhere else is it possible to see the Christian precept, Love thine enemy, realized in a more Christian way than in the land of the Vendetta.
Often, too, mediators, called parolanti, interfere between the parties at feud, who swear before them an oath of reconciliation. This oath is religiously sacred; he who breaks it is an outlaw, and dishonoured before God and man. It is seldom broken, but it is broken, for the demon has made his lair in human hearts.
CHAPTER X.
BANDIT LIFE.
"On! on! These are his footsteps plainly;
Trust the dumb lead of the betraying track!
For as the bloodhounds trace the wounded deer,
So we, by his sweat and blood, do scent him out."
Æschyl. Eumen.
How the Corsican may be compelled to live as bandit, may be suddenly hurled from his peaceable home, and the quiet of civic life, into the mountain fastnesses, to wander henceforth with the ban of outlawry on him, will be clear from what we have seen of the Vendetta.
The Corsican bandit is not, like the Italian, a thief and robber, but strictly what his name implies—a man whom the law has banned. According to the old statute, all those are banditti on whom sentence of banishment from the island has been passed, because justice has not been able to lay hands on them. They were declared outlaws, and any one was free to slay a bandit if he came in his way. The idea of banishment has quite naturally been extended to all whom the law proscribes.
The isolation of Corsica, want of means, and love of their native soil, prevent the outlawed Corsicans from leaving their island. In former times, Corsican bandits occasionally escaped to Greece, where they fought bravely; at present, many seek refuge in Italy, and still more in Sardinia, if they prefer to leave their country. Flight from the law is nowhere in the world a simpler matter than in Corsica. The blood has scarcely been shed before the doer of the deed is in the hills, which are everywhere close at hand, and where he easily conceals himself in the impenetrable macchia. From the moment that he has entered the macchia, he is termed bandit. His relatives and friends alone are acquainted with his traces; as long as it is possible, they furnish him with necessaries; many a dark night they secretly receive him into their houses; and however hard pressed, the bandit always finds some goat-herd who will supply his wants.
The main haunts of the bandits are between Tor and Mount Santo Appiano, in the wildernesses of Monte Cinto and Monte Rotondo, and in the inaccessible regions of Niolo. There the deep shades of natural forests that have never seen an axe, and densest brushwood of dwarf-oak, albatro, myrtles, and heath, clothe the declivities of the mountains; wild torrents roar unseen through gloomy ravines, where every path is lost; and caves, grottos, and shattered rocks, afford concealment. There the bandit lives, with the falcon, the fox, and the wild sheep, a life more romantic and more comfortless than that of the American savage. Justice takes her course. She has condemned the bandit in contumaciam. The bandit laughs at her; he says in his strange way, "I have got the sonetto!" meaning the sentence in contumaciam. The sbirri are out upon his track—the avengers of blood the same—he is in constant flight—he is the Wandering Jew of the desolate hills. Now come the conflicts with the gendarmes, heroic, fearful conflicts; his hands grow bloodier; but not with the blood of sbirri only, for the bandit is avenger too; it is not for love to his wretched life—it is far rather for revenge that he lives. He has sworn death to his enemy's kindred. One can imagine what a wild and fierce intensity his vengeful feelings must acquire in the frightful savageness of nature round him, and in its yet more frightful solitude, under constant thoughts of death, and dreams of the scaffold. Sometimes the bandit issues from the mountains to slay his enemy; when he has accomplished his vengeance, he vanishes again in the hills. Not seldom the Corsican bandit rises into a Carl Moor[F]—into an avenger upon society of real or supposed injuries it has done him. The history of the bandit Capracinta of Prunelli is still well known in Corsica. The authorities had unjustly condemned his father to the galleys; the son forthwith took to the macchia with some of his relations, and these avengers from time to time descended from the mountains, and stabbed and shot personal enemies, soldiers, and spies; they one day captured the public executioner, and executed the man himself.
It frequently happens, as we might naturally expect, that the bandits allow themselves to become the tools of others who have a Vendetta to accomplish, and who have recourse to them for the obligation of a dagger or a bullet. In a country of such limited extent, and where the families are so intricately and so widely connected, the bandits cannot but become formidable. They are the sanguinary scourges of the country; agriculture is neglected, the vineyards lie waste—for who will venture into the field if he is menaced by Massoni or Serafino? There are, moreover, among the bandits, men who were previously accustomed to exercise influence upon others, and to take part in public life. Banished to the wilderness, their inactivity becomes intolerable to them; and I was assured that some, in their caverns and hiding-places, continue even to read newspapers which they contrive to procure. They frequently exert an influence of terror on the communal elections, and even on the elections for the General Council. It is no unusual thing for them to threaten judges and witnesses, and to effect a bloody revenge for the sentence pronounced. This, and the great mildness of the verdicts usually brought in by Corsican juries, have been the ground of a wish, already frequently expressed, for the abolition of the jury in Corsica. It is not to be denied that a Corsican jury-box may be influenced by the fear of the vengeance of the bandits; but if we accuse them indiscriminately of excessive leniency, we shall in many cases do these jurymen wrong; for the bandit life and its causes must be viewed under the conditions of Corsican society. I was present at the sitting of a jury in Bastia, an hour after the execution of Bracciamozzo, and in the same building in front of which he had been guillotined; the impression of the public execution seemed to me perceptible in the appearance of the jury and the spectators, but not in that of the prisoner at the bar. He was a young man who had shot some one—he had a stolid hardened face, and his skull looked like a negro's, as if you might use it for an anvil. Neither what had lately occurred, nor the solemnity of the proceedings of the assize, made the slightest impression on the fellow; he showed no trace of embarrassment or fear, but answered the interrogatories of the examining judge with the greatest sang-froid, expressing himself briefly and concisely as to the circumstances of his murderous act. I have forgotten to how many years' confinement he was sentenced.
Although the Corsican bandit never lowers himself to common robbery, he holds it not inconsistent with his knightly honour to extort money. The bandits levy black-mail, they tax individuals, frequently whole villages, according to their means, and call in their tribute with great strictness. They impose these taxes as kings of the bush; and I was told their subjects paid them more promptly and conscientiously than they do their taxes to the imperial government of France. It often happens, that the bandit sends a written order into the house of some wealthy individual, summoning him to deposit so many thousand francs in a spot specified; and informing him that if he refuses, himself, his house, and his vineyards, will be destroyed. The usual formula of the threat is—Si preparasse—let him prepare. Others, again, fall into the hands of the bandits, and have to pay a ransom for their release. All intercourse becomes thus more and more insecure; agriculture impossible. With the extorted money, the bandits enrich their relatives and friends, and procure themselves many a favour; they cannot put the money to any immediate personal use—for though they had it in heaps, they must nevertheless continue to live in the caverns of the mountain wilds, and in constant flight.
Many bandits have led their outlaw life for fifteen or twenty years, and, small as is the range allowed them by their hills, have maintained themselves successfully against the armed power of the State, victorious in every struggle, till the bandit's fate at length overtook them. The Corsican banditti do not live in troops, as in this way the country could not support them; and, moreover, the Corsican is by nature indisposed to submit to the commands of a leader. They generally live in twos, contracting a sort of brotherhood. They have their deadly enmities among themselves too, and their deadly revenge; this is astonishing, but so powerful is the personal feel of revenge with the Corsican, that the similarity of their unhappy lot never reconciles bandit with bandit, if a Vendetta has existed between them. Many stories are told of one bandit's hunting another among the hills, till he had slain him, on account of a Vendetta. Massoni and Serafino, the two latest bandit heroes of Corsica, were at feud, and shot at each other when opportunity offered. A shot of Massoni's had deprived Serafino of one of his fingers.
The history of the Corsican bandits is rich in extraordinary, heroic, chivalrous, traits of character. Throughout the whole country they sing the bandit dirges; and naturally enough, for it is their own fate, their own sorrow, that they thus sing. Numbers of the bandits have become immortal; but the bold deeds of one especially are still famous. His name was Teodoro, and he called himself king of the mountains. Corsica has thus had two kings of the name of Theodore. Teodoro Poli was enrolled on the list of conscripts, one day in the beginning of the present century. He had begged to be allowed time to raise money for a substitute. He was seized, however, and compelled to join the ranks. Teodoro's high spirit and love of freedom revolted at this. He threw himself into the mountains, and began to live as bandit. He astonished all Corsica by his deeds of audacious hardihood, and became the terror of the island. But no meanness stained his fame; on the contrary, his generosity was the theme of universal praise, and he forgave even relatives of his enemies. His personal appearance was remarkably handsome, and, like his namesake, the king, he was fond of rich and fantastic dress. His lot was shared by his mistress, who lived in affluence on the contributions (taglia) which Teodoro imposed upon the villages. Another bandit, called Brusco, to whom he had vowed inviolable friendship, also lived with him, and his uncle Augellone. Augellone means bird of ill omen—it is customary for the bandits to give themselves surnames as soon as they begin to play a part in the macchia. The Bird of Ill Omen became envious of Brusco, because Teodoro was so fond of him, and one day he put the cold iron a little too deep into his breast. He thereupon made off into the rocks. When Teodoro heard of the fall of Brusco, he cried aloud for grief, not otherwise than Achilles at the fall of Patroclus, and, according to the old custom of the avengers, began to let his beard grow, swearing never to cut it till he had bathed in the blood of Augellone. A short time passed, and Teodoro was once more seen with his beard cut. These are the little tragedies of which the mountain fastnesses are the scene, and the bandits the players—for the passions of the human heart are everywhere the same. Teodoro at length fell ill. A spy gave information of the hiding-place of the sick lion, and the wild wolf-hounds, the sbirri, were immediately among the hills—they killed Teodoro in a goat-herd's shieling. Two of them, however, learned how dangerously he could still handle his weapons. The popular ballad sings of him, that he fell with the pistol in his hand and the firelock by his side, come un fiero paladino—like a proud paladin. Such was the respect which this king of the mountains had inspired, that the people continued to pay his tribute, even after his fall. For at his death there was still some due, and those who owed the arrears came and dropped their money respectfully into the cradle of the little child, the offspring of Teodoro and his queen. Teodoro met his death in the year 1827.
Gallocchio is another celebrated outlaw. He had conceived an attachment for a girl who became faithless to him, and he had forbidden any other to seek her hand. Cesario Negroni wooed and won her. The young Gallocchio gave one of his friends a hint to wound the father-in-law. The wedding guests are dancing merrily, merrily twang the fiddles and the mandolines—a shot! The ball had missed its way, and pierced the father-in-law's heart. Gallocchio now becomes bandit. Cesario intrenches himself. But Gallocchio forces him to leave the building, hunts him through the mountains, finds him, kills him. Gallocchio now fled to Greece, and fought there against the Turks. One day the news reached him that his own brother had fallen in the Vendetta war which had continued to rage between the families involved in it by the death of the father-in-law, and that of Cesario. Gallocchio came back, and killed two brothers of Cesario; then more of his relatives, till at length he had extirpated his whole family. The red Gambini was his comrade; with his aid he constantly repulsed the gendarmes; and on one occasion they bound one of them to a horse's tail, and dragged him so over the rocks. Gambini fled to Greece, where the Turks cut off his head; but Gallocchio died in his sleep, for a traitor shot him.
Santa Lucia Giammarchi is also famous; he held the bush for sixteen years; Camillo Ornano ranged the mountains for fourteen years; and Joseph Antommarchi was seventeen years a bandit.
The celebrated bandit Serafino was shot shortly before my arrival in Corsica; he had been betrayed, and was slain while asleep. Arrighi, too, and the terrible Massoni, had met their death a short time previously—a death as wild and romantic as their lives had been.
Massoni was a man of the most daring spirit, and unheard of energy; he belonged to a wealthy family in Balagna. The Vendetta had driven him into the mountains, where he lived many years, supported by his relations, and favoured by the herdsmen, killing, in frequent struggles, a great number of sbirri. His companions were his brother and the brave Arrighi. One day, a man of the province of Balagna, who had to avenge the blood of a kinsman on a powerful family, sought him out, and asked his assistance. The bandit received him hospitably, and as his provisions happened to be exhausted at the time, went to a shepherd of Monte Rotondo, and demanded a lamb; the herdsman gave him one from his flock. Massoni, however, refused it, saying—"You give me a lean lamb, and yet to-day I wish to do honour to a guest; see, yonder is a fat one, I must have it;" and instantly he shot the fat lamb down, and carried it off to his cave.
The shepherd was provoked by the unscrupulous act. Meditating revenge, he descended from the hills, and offered to show the sbirri Massoni's lurking-place. The shepherd was resolved to avenge the blood of his lamb. The sbirri came up the hills, in force. These Corsican gendarmes, well acquainted with the nature of their country, and practised in banditti warfare, are no less brave and daring than the game they hunt. Their lives are in constant danger when they venture into the mountains; for the bandits are watchful—they keep a look-out with their telescopes, with which they are always provided, and when danger is discovered they are up and away more swiftly than the muffro, the wild sheep; or they let their pursuers come within ball-range, and they never miss their mark.
The sbirri, then, ascended the hills, the shepherd at their head; they crept up the rocks by paths which he alone knew. The bandits were lying in a cave. It was almost inaccessible, and concealed by bushes. Arrighi and the brother of Massoni lay within, Massoni himself sat behind the bushes on the watch.
Some of the sbirri had reached a point above the cave, others guarded its mouth. Those above looked down into the bush to see if they could make out anything. One sbirro took a stone and pitched it into the bush, in which he thought he saw some black object; in a moment a man sprang out, and fired a pistol to awake those in the cavern. But the same instant were heard the muskets of the sbirri, and Massoni fell dead on the spot.
At the report of the fire-arms a man leapt out of the cave, Massoni's brother. He bounded like a wild-goat in daring leaps from crag to crag, the balls whizzing about his head. One hit him fatally, and he fell among the rocks. Arrighi, who saw everything that passed, kept close within the cave. The gendarmes pressed cautiously forward, but for a while no one dared to enter the grotto, till at length some of the hardiest ventured in. There was nobody to be seen; the sbirri, however, were not to be cheated, and confident that the cavern concealed their man, camped about its mouth.
Night came. They lighted torches and fires. It was resolved to starve Arrighi into surrender; in the morning some of them went to a spring near the cave to fetch water—the crack of a musket once, twice, and two sbirri fell. Their companions, infuriated, fired into the cavern—all was still.
The next thing to be done was to bring in the two dead or dying men. After much hesitation a party made the attempt, and again it cost one of them his life. Another day passed. At last it occurred to one of them to smoke the bandit out like a badger—a plan already adopted with success in Algiers. They accordingly heaped dry wood at the entrance of the cave, and set fire to it; but the smoke found egress through chinks in the rock. Arrighi heard every word that was said, and kept up actual dialogues with the gendarmes, who could not see, much less hit him. He refused to surrender, although pardon was promised him. At length the procurator, who had been brought from Ajaccio, sent to the city of Corte for military and an engineer. The engineer was to give his opinion as to whether the cave might be blown up with gunpowder. The engineer came, and said it was possible to throw petards into it. Arrighi heard what was proposed, and found the thought of being blown to atoms with the rocks of his hiding-place so shocking, that he resolved on flight.
He waited till nightfall, then rolling some stones down in a false direction, he sprang away from rock to rock, to reach another mountain. The uncertain shots of the sbirri echoed through the darkness. One ball struck him on the thigh. He lost blood, and his strength was failing; when the day dawned, his bloody track betrayed him, as its bloody sweat the stricken deer. The sbirri took up the scent. Arrighi, wearied to death, had lain down under a block. On this block a sbirro mounted, his piece ready. Arrighi stretched out his head to look around him—a report, and the ball was in his brain.
So died these three outlawed avengers, fortunate that they did not end on the scaffold. Such was their reputation, however, with the people, that none of the inhabitants of Monte Rotondo or its neighbourhood would lend his mule to convey away the bodies of the fallen men. For, said these people, we will have no part in the blood that you have shed. When at length mules had been procured, the dead men, bandits and sbirri, were put upon their backs, and the troop of gendarmes descended the hills, six corpses hanging across the mule-saddles, six men killed in the banditti warfare.
If this island of Corsica could again give forth all the blood which in the course of centuries has been shed upon it—the blood of those who have fallen in battle, and the blood of those who have fallen in the Vendetta—the red deluge would inundate its cities and villages, and drown its people, and crimson the sea from the Corsican shore to Genoa. Verily, violent death has here his peculiar realm.
It is difficult to believe what the historian Filippini tells us, that, in thirty years of his own time, 28,000 Corsicans had been murdered out of revenge. According to the calculation of another Corsican historian, I find that in the thirty-two years previous to 1715, 28,715 murders had been committed in Corsica. The same historian calculates that, according to this proportion, the number of the victims of the Vendetta, from 1359 to 1729, was 333,000. An equal number, he is of opinion, must be allowed for the wounded. We have, therefore, within the time specified, 666,000 Corsicans struck by the hand of the assassin. This people resembles the hydra, whose heads, though cut off, constantly grow on anew.
According to the speech of the Corsican Prefect before the General Council of the Departments, in August 1852, 4300 murders (assassinats) have been committed since 1821; during the four years ending with 1851, 833; during the last two of these 319, and during the first seven months of 1852, 99.
The population of the island is 250,000.
The Government proposes to eradicate the Vendetta and the bandit life by a general disarming of the people. How this is to be effected, and whether it is at all practicable, I cannot tell. It will occasion mischief enough, for the bandits cannot be disarmed along with the citizens, and their enemies will be exposed defenceless to their balls. The bandit life, the family feuds, and the Vendetta, which the law has been powerless to prevent, have hitherto made it necessary to permit the carrying of arms. For, since the law cannot protect the individual, it must leave him at liberty to protect himself; and thus it happens that Corsican society finds itself, in a sense, without the pale of the state, in the condition of natural law, and armed self-defence. This is a strange and startling phenomenon in Europe in our present century. It is long since the wearing of pistols and daggers was forbidden, but every one here carries his double-barreled gun, and I have found half villages in arms, as if in a struggle against invading barbarians—a wild, fantastic spectacle, these reckless men all about one in some lonely and dreary region of the hills, in their shaggy pelone, and Phrygian cap, the leathern cartridge-belt about their waist, and gun upon their shoulder.
Nothing is likely to eradicate the Vendetta, murder, and the bandit life, but advanced culture. Culture, however, advances very slowly in Corsica. Colonization, the making of roads through the interior, such an increase of general intercourse and industry as would infuse life into the ports—this might amount to a complete disarming of the population. The French Government, utterly powerless against the defiant Corsican spirit, most justly deserves reproach for allowing an island which possesses the finest climate; districts of great fertility; a position commanding the entire Mediterranean between Spain, France, Italy, and Africa; and the most magnificent gulfs and harbours; which is rich in forests, in minerals, in healing springs, and in fruits, and is inhabited by a brave, spirited, highly capable people—for allowing Corsica to become a Montenegro or Italian Ireland.