BOOK VIII.—WANDERINGS IN CORSICA.
CHAPTER I.
AJACCIO.
Ajaccio lies at the northern end of one of the most magnificent gulfs in the world. The lines of its two opposite coasts are of unequal length. The northern is the shorter; it runs out in a westerly direction to the Punta della Parata, off which lie the Isole Sanguinarie, or Bloody Islands. The southern side of the gulf stretches from north to south in a long and very irregular line to Cape Muro, on rounding which you enter the Bay of Valinco.
No villages are seen on the northern shore; on the southern but few, with here and there a solitary tower or a lighthouse. Lofty hills rise over the northern end of the beautiful gulf; at their base lies the valley of the Gravone, ending towards the sea in the fertile plain of Campo di Loro. The situation of Ajaccio has an astonishing resemblance to that of Naples.
It is said that Ajaccio is one of the oldest cities in Corsica. According to the fable of some chroniclers, it derives its name from the Telamonian Ajax; according to others, it was founded by Agazzo, the son of the Trojan prince Corso, who wandered with Æneas into the western Mediterranean, carried off Sica, the niece of Dido, and thus gave the island the name of Corsica. Ptolemy places the ancient city of Urcinium on the Gulf of Ajaccio, supposed to be the Adjacium of the earliest period of the Middle Ages, a town which is always mentioned along with the oldest in the island—with Aleria, Mariana, Nebium, and Sagona, cities which now no longer exist.
The ancient Ajaccio, however, did not occupy the site of the present town; it lay on an eminence farther to the north. The hill is called San Giovanni; on its summit lie the ruins of an old castle, named Castello Vecchio, and there formerly lay near them the remains of an ancient cathedral, in which it was customary for the bishops of Ajaccio to be consecrated, long after it had fallen into decay. These ruins have vanished; nothing now betrays the former existence of a city on this spot. But many ancient Roman coins have been found in the vineyards; also oval-shaped sarcophagi of terracotta, always containing a skeleton and a key. It is said that the vaulted tombs of the Moorish kings were also formerly shown here; but they have disappeared.
The new town and the citadel were founded by the Bank of St. George of Genoa in the year 1492. It was the residence of a lieutenant of the Governor of Bastia, and did not become the capital of the island till the year 1811, when it was elevated to its new dignity at the instance of Madame Letitia and Cardinal Fesch, who wished in this way to give distinction to their own and the Emperor's birthplace.
The best view of the town and its environs is from the hill of San Giovanni. It presents one of the prettiest pictures that can be imagined, and is equalled by no other city in Corsica. The distance is incomparable. Cloud-topped hills stretching far into the interior, the majestic gulf in azure splendour, an Italian vegetation and a southern sky—no finer combination could be thought of; and here in the midst of it lies a quite idyllic, silent, innocent little town of 11,500 inhabitants, concealed among the verdure of its elms, the mistress of a region which seems intended to be the environment of one of the capitals of the world.
Ajaccio lies on a tongue of land, the extremity of which is occupied by the castle. Portions of the town stretch on each side of this tongue along the gulf. The avenue of elms and planes which leads into the city is continued along its main street—the Cours Napoleon, which is properly the prolongation of the road from Corte. Part of it has had to be blasted through the rocks, two of which still stand at the entrance of the town, close to the houses. In the Corso itself the elms give place to orange-trees of considerable size, which give the street a rich and festive look. The houses are high, but destitute of architectural merit. The gray jalousies are characteristic; this is the colour preferred in Corsica, while in Italy they are usually of a lively green. The gray gives to the buildings a dead, monotonous air. All the more considerable edifices of the Corso stand on the right side; the little Theatre, the Prefecture—a handsome building—and the military barracks.
The rural quiet pervading these streets of Ajaccio surprised me; but their names speak loudly to the traveller, and relate the history of Napoleon. You read Cours Napoleon, Rue Napoleon, Rue Fesch, Rue Cardinal, Place Letitia, and Rue du Roi de Rome, which last awakens mournful recollections. The memory of Napoleon is the proper soul of the town, and you saunter onwards, out of one little street into another, musing on the wonderful man and his childhood, and soon you have wandered through them all. The Rue Fesch runs parallel with the Cours Napoleon; the former leads to the spacious Place du Diamant, which lies on the shore, and has beautiful view of the gulf and its southern coast; the latter ends in the market-place (du marché), and leads to the harbour. These are the two principal streets and squares of Ajaccio. Narrow lanes connect them, and intersect the whole of the tongue of land. The silence invites memory and thought, and silently the mirror of the blue gulf stretches away before the view. You see it from almost every street. The eye is nowhere imprisoned by walls, for the main streets are wide, the squares spacious, planted with green trees; and the sea, and green olive-clad hills, which rise close upon the city, look in upon you wherever you go or stand. Ajaccio is at once an inland and a coast town—you live there in the heart of Nature.
In the cool of the evening, the Corso and Diamond Place grew livelier. The military band began to play in the Place; the people gathered here and there in groups, or moved about. Most of the women wore black veils, those of the middle classes were enveloped in the black faldetta. It was easy to imagine you were in some city of Spain.
The Ajaccians have the finest promenades in the world, whether they choose the beautiful esplanade which has so romantic a name, or the walks along the gulf among alleys of elms, and through vineyards and olive-gardens. I know few promenades from which so fine a view is to be had as that from the quiet Place du Diamant in Ajaccio. Immediately in front of it the murmuring sea; towards the land cheerful rows of houses; among them, a stately military hospital and a handsome Catholic College; close over these houses a green hill. A stone breastwork runs along the side next the gulf; a few steps bring you to the strand, which is fringed by an alley of trees.
I found nothing in Ajaccio more pleasant than to wander about on the Place du Diamant in the evening, when the west wind blew fresh over the gulf, or to sit on the breastwork, and feast my eyes on the magic panorama of sea and hills. The sky of Italy is then lit up with a brilliance as of fairy-land; the air is so clear that the Milky Way and the planet Venus throw long lines of radiance across the gulf, and the waves reflect a mild splendour. Where they are in motion, or are furrowed by a passing skiff, they tremble with phosphorescent sparks. Above, the shore wraps itself in night; the beacons gleam from the headlands, and on the hills you see in many places great fires blazing. They are burning copsewood there—a practice common in the month of August, in order to gain land for tillage, which is at the same time manured by the ashes. These fires continue to burn for days. During the day they roll white clouds of smoke over the hills, at night they glare over the gulf like volcanoes, and then the resemblance to the Gulf of Naples becomes striking. A magnificent illumination may thus be enjoyed every evening on the Diamond Place of Ajaccio.
The market-place is no less beautiful, though it affords a less comprehensive view. You see from it the safe and beautiful harbour, confined by a granite mole erected by Napoleon. On the side of the harbour, a beautiful quay of granite bounds the market-place, which, planted with trees, has a look of rural peace. At its entrance stands the principal fountain in Ajaccio, a large cube of marble, from the sides of which the water gushes into semi-circular basins. It is thronged from morning till night with women and children drawing water; and I could never look on these groups without being reminded of Old Testament scenes of the same character. In warm countries, the wells are the very fountains of poetry and sociable intercourse; well and hearth are the time-honoured centres round which human society has always gathered.—The women here do not draw their water in the antique vessels of metal used in Bastia, but in cask-shaped pitchers of terracotta, the handles of which lie across the mouths. These pitchers are also ancient; and another kind of earthenware pitcher, common in Ajaccio, with a long slender neck, has a thoroughly Etruscan look. The poor inhabitants of the barren island of Capraja support themselves partly by making these vessels, which are sent to great distances.
On the same market-place, behind the fountain, close upon the harbour and before the handsome town-house, stands a marble statue of Napoleon, on an excessively high and disagreeably tapering pedestal of granite. The inscription is as follows: "His native city to the Emperor Napoleon, on the 5th May 1850, the second year of the presidency of Louis Napoleon." Ajaccio had long been endeavouring to raise a monument to Napoleon, and always in vain. The arrival of a statue in Corsica was therefore an event of no small importance for the island. It chanced that the Bonaparte family on one occasion sent Signor Ramolino the statue of a Ganymede. The people seeing it as it was taken out of the vessel, took the eagle of Ganymede for the imperial eagle, and Ganymede himself for Napoleon; they assembled in the market-place, and demanded that the statue should forthwith be placed on the above-mentioned fountain, that they might at last have the great Napoleon in marble in the market-place. The worthy Corsicans, in thus turning the Trojan youth Ganymede into their countryman Napoleon, certainly seem to give some colour to the old fable of the chroniclers, that the Ajaccians are descended from a Trojan prince.
The beautiful statue of Napoleon, by the Florentine Bartolini, was originally intended for Ajaccio; but a disagreement arose about the price (60,000 francs), and Bartolini's work never became one of the ornaments of Ajaccio. The statue of Napoleon in the market-place is by Laboureur, and is only of mediocre merit; but its position, in full view of the gulf, gives it an admirable local effect. It is a consular statue. The consul looks from the pedestal upon the sea, turning from his little native town to the world-embracing element. He wears the Roman toga, and on his head a wreath of bays; his right hand grasps a rudder, which rests upon a ball representing the globe. The idea is happy; for in sight of the gulf the rudder appears a quite natural symbol, and is doubly significant in the hand of an islander. The mind of the beholder dwells here not on the history of the complete, but of the incipient ruler; for he sees around him the little world of Ajaccio, in which the mightiest European man went about as child and youth, unconscious who he was, and for what fate had destined him. Then the memory wanders from the market-place to the gulf, and sees the ship anchor there, which bore the General Napoleon Bonaparte from Egypt to France. During the night he sat on board that vessel, eagerly reading such newspapers as could be procured for him in Ajaccio; and it was here that he formed the resolution to seize that rudder with which he was to rule not France alone, but an empire and a hemisphere, till it broke in his hand, and the man of Corsica went to wreck on the island of St. Helena.
Very few vessels, some luggers, and one or two schooners, lie in the harbour. Not, like the Bay of San Fiorenzo, exposed to the maestrale, or north-west wind, but protected by its shores from every storm, this magnificent gulf is capable of sheltering in its roads the largest fleets. But the port is completely dull, and destitute of trade. Once a week, on Saturday, comes a steamer from Marseilles, and brings news of the world, and supplies of necessary articles. I have often heard Corsicans complain that the native city of Napoleon, though possessing the advantages of an incomparable situation, and an excellent climate, was nothing more than an ordinary little provincial town of France. You only need to walk round the market-place, where most of the shops are, on the ground-floors of the houses, to see how slow the sale of goods is, and how limited the native industry. You do not see a single shop where articles of luxury are sold—nothing but the most indispensable handicrafts, such as shoemaking and tailoring; and the wares that look most like to articles of luxury, seem old-fashioned and spoiled.
I found only one book-shop in Ajaccio: it was kept by a dealer in small wares, who sold soap, cordage, knives, and baskets as well as books. The town-house, however, contains, for Ajaccio, a highly considerable library, of 27,000 volumes. It was founded by Lucian Bonaparte, and the opinion is, that he has done greater service to his country in connexion with this library, than by his epic in twelve cantos: La Cyrneïde. The prefecture also possesses a valuable library, which is particularly rich in archives and important documents of Corsican history.
In the town-house is also preserved the collection of pictures which Cardinal Fesch bequeathed to his native city. It consists of 1000 paintings. The poor citizens of Ajaccio have no proper museum in which to hang these; they have consequently lain for years in a lumber-room. Fesch also proposed to make his house an institution for the Jesuits; latterly he made it a college, which now bears his name. It has a principal, and twelve teachers for various branches of science and literature.
Ajaccio is very poor in public institutions and public buildings. Its most important edifice is the house of the Bonapartes.
CHAPTER II.
THE CASA BONAPARTE.
The narrow street of St. Charles issues upon a little square. An elm stands there before an oldish three-storied house, the plaster of which has been coloured a yellowish-gray; it has a flat roof, and a balustrade above it, a front of six windows in breadth, and doors that look greatly decayed. On the corner of this house you read the words: "Place Letitia."
No marble tablet tells the stranger who has come from Italy, where the houses of great men always bear inscriptions, that he stands before the house of the Bonapartes. He knocks in vain at the door; no voice answers, and all the windows are closely veiled with gray jalousies, as if the house were in a state of siege from the Vendetta. Not a human being is stirring upon the square; a deathlike stillness rests upon the neighbourhood, as if the name of Napoleon had frightened it into silence, or scared all else away.
At length an old man appeared at the window of a house close by, and requested me to return in two hours, when he should be able to give me the key.
Bonaparte's house, which has, I am assured, sustained but slight alteration, though no palace, has plainly been the dwelling of a patrician family. Its appearance shows this, and it is without doubt a palace compared with the village-cabin in which Pasquale Paoli was born. It is roomy, handsome, and convenient. But the rooms are destitute of furniture; the tapestries alone have been left on the walls, and they are decayed. The floor, which, as is usual in Corsica, is laid out in small hexagonal red flags, is here and there ruinous. The darkness produced in the rooms by the closed jalousies, and their emptiness, made them quite dismal.
Once, in the time of the beautiful Letitia, this house was alive with the busy stir of a numerous family, and brilliant with joyous hospitality. Now, it is like a tomb, and in vain you look around you for a single object on which fancy may hang associations with the history of its enigmatic inhabitants. The naked walls can tell no tale.
I do not know when the Casa Bonaparte was erected, but it can hardly be very old. It was built, no doubt, when the Genoese were supreme in the island, perhaps when Louis Quatorze was filling the world with his own fame, and with the fame of France. I thought of the time when the master of the craftsmen who erected it pronounced over the house, on its completion, the customary blessing, and when, according to ancient usage, the family for whom it had been built was solemnly conducted into it by an assemblage of kinsfolk—all alike unconscious that the whim of fortune would one day shower upon its roof the crowns of kingdoms and of empires, and that it was yet to cradle the race of princes who were to share among them the thrones of a continent.
The excited fancy seeks them in these rooms, and sees them assembled round their mother, children in no respect differing from ordinary children—boys who toil over their Plutarch and their Cæsar, schoolmastered by their grave father, or their granduncle Lucian, and three young sisters who grow up thoughtlessly, and rather wild, like their playmates, in the half-barbarous island-town. There is Joseph, the eldest, and there Napoleon, the second son, with Lucian, Louis, and Jerome; there Caroline, Eliza, and Paulina, the children of a notary of moderate income, who is constantly and to no purpose carrying on lawsuits with the Jesuits of Ajaccio about a contested property, of which, with his large family, he stands in great need. For it is a matter of much anxiety to him, how his children are to be provided for. How will they prosper in the world? and in what way secure for themselves a respectable livelihood?
And lo! these same children one day put forth their hands, one after another, and grasp the mightiest crowns of the earth, tear them from the heads of the most unapproachable majesties of Europe, wear them before all the world, are embraced as brothers and brothers-in-law by emperors and kings, while great nations fall submissive at their feet, and abandon to the sons of the notary of Ajaccio their country, their wealth, and their blood. Napoleon is European Emperor, Joseph king of Spain, Louis king of Holland, Jerome king of Westphalia, Paulina a princess of Italy, Eliza a princess of Italy, Caroline queen of Naples. In this little house were so many crowned potentates born and brought up; their mother a woman whose name the world had never heard, daughter of a citizen of a small, obscure, provincial town, Letitia Ramolino, who married at the age of fourteen a man as little known to fame as herself. It may be said with truth, that in her labours this mother travailed with the world's history.
There is no fable in all the Arabian Nights apparently more fabulous than the story of the Bonaparte family. That this romance has, however, realized itself in the quiet, sober days of our modern era, must be regarded as a great fact in history, and as a piece of great good fortune. The history of humanity, clogged with political precedent, and paralysed by bureaus and red tape, has thereby been shaken with earthquake force into fresh activity, and flushed with a new life, and man has been shown to be stronger than a supposed political necessity. Human power and human passion have been freed from the spell under which the traditional limitations of rank had bound them, and it has been proved that the individual, though born among the dust, may become anything and everything, because men are equal. That the history of the Bonapartes should appear fabulous is the fault of the mediæval tinge that still attaches to our ideas of life, and of the received notions as to the impassable barriers interposed by social difference. Napoleon is the political Faust. His historical greatness does not lie in his battles, but in his revolutionary nature. He overthrew the political gods of tradition. The history of this predestined man is therefore very simple, human, and natural, but it cannot yet be written.
History, too, is Nature. There is a chain of causes and effects, and what we call genius, or a great man, is always the necessary result of definite conditions.
More than a thousand years of almost uninterrupted conflict between Corsica and her oppressors preceded the birth of the great conqueror Napoleon, in whose nature this rock-bound island, and this insular people, steeled in conflict, and forcibly thrown back upon itself by the narrow space to which it was confined, created for themselves an organ whose law was—illimitedness. The ascending series was this: the Corsican bandit, the Corsican soldier, Renuccio della Rocca, Sampiero, Gaffori, Pasquale Paoli, Napoleon.
I entered a little room with blue tapestry, and two windows, one of which, with a balcony before it, looked into a court, the other into the street. You see here a wall-press, behind a tapestried door, and a fireplace with a mantelpiece of yellow marble ornamented with some mythological reliefs. In this room, on the 15th of August 1769, Napoleon was born. It is a strange feeling, hard to put in language, which takes possession of the soul on the spot hallowed as the birthplace of a great man. Something sacred, mystic, a consecrated atmosphere, pervades it. It is as if you were casting a glance behind the curtain of Nature, where she creates in silence the incomprehensible organs of her action. But man discerns only the phenomenal, he attempts in vain to ascertain the how. To stand in silence before the unsearchable mysteries of Nature, and see with wonder the radiant forms that ascend from the darkness—that is human religion. For the thoughtful man nothing is more deeply impressive than the starry sky of night, or the starry sky of history. I saw other rooms, the ballroom of the family, Madame Letitia's room, Napoleon's little room where he slept, and that in which he studied. The two little wall-presses are still to be seen there in which his school-books stood. Books stand in them at present. With eager curiosity I took out some of them, as if they were Napoleon's; they were yellow with age—law-books, theological treatises, a Livy, a Guicciardini, and others, probably the property of the Pietra Santa family, who are related to the Bonapartes, and to whom their house in Ajaccio now belongs.
It is well to review in connexion with this house the early history of Napoleon, about which our information is still insufficient. I shall relate what I know of it by hearsay or reading. I am largely indebted to the lately published work of the Corsican Nasica—Mémoires sur l'Enfance et la Jeunesse de Napoléon jusqu'à l'age de vingt-trois ans. It is dedicated to the uncle's nephew, and is written without talent or insight, but contains facts which are undoubtedly correct, and some valuable documents.
CHAPTER III.
THE BONAPARTE FAMILY.
The origin of the Bonaparte family can no longer be precisely ascertained. Low flattery has availed itself of the most ridiculous means to procure Napoleon ancient and dignified ancestors. A pedigree has even been constructed beginning with Emanuel II., the eighth Greek emperor of the house of the Comneni, whose two sons are said to have emigrated under the name of Bonaparte after the fall of Constantinople, first to Corfu, then to Naples, Rome, and Florence. From them, as this ridiculous fiction will have it, the Corsican Bonapartes are descended.
It has been historically proved that the Bonapartes figured among the seigniors of the Italian cities during the Middle Ages. The Bonapartes were inscribed in the Golden Book of Bologna, among the Patricians of Florence, and in the book of the nobility of Treviso. When Napoleon became son-in-law of Austria, the Emperor Francis ordered active researches to be made as to the position occupied by the Bonaparte family in Italy during the Middle Ages; and sent his son-in-law some documents purporting to prove that the Bonapartes had been for a long period the lords of Treviso. Napoleon expressed himself as obliged, but replied that he found himself sufficiently honoured in being the Rudolph of Hapsburg of his race. On another occasion he declined the ancient patents of nobility which were being palmed on him, with the words: "I date my nobility from Millesimo and Montenotte."
It is quite uncertain when the Bonapartes came to Corsica. Muratori quotes a document of the year 947, in which three Corsican seigniors—Otho, Domenico, and Guido—gift their estate of Venaco in Corsica to Silverio, Abbot of the cloister of Monte Cristo; a Messer Bonaparte signing the instrument in Mariana, along with other witnesses. The family, or rather a branch of it, would therefore seem to have come to Corsica at an early period. Others, perhaps, followed in later centuries, for the Tuscan Bonapartes were partly Guelphs and partly Ghibellines, and were alternately expatriated with the one or the other faction. It is known that some of them removed to Sarzana, in the district of Lunigiana, where they entered into the service of the powerful Malaspinas, with whom, as I am disposed to believe, they came over to Corsica. Another branch remained in Tuscany, establishing itself there permanently—first in Florence, and afterwards in the little town of San Miniato al Tedesco, which lies upon the road to Pisa. The family had its tomb in the Church of San Spirito at Florence; and I saw there, in the piazza of the convent, a stone with the inscription, in antique lettering—
S. di Benedeto
Di Piero di Giovanni
Buonaparte. E di sua Descendenti.
The coat of arms above the inscription bears two stars, one in its upper and one in its lower division, significantly enough—for the star has twice ascended over the house of Bonaparte.
Members of his family were still living in San Miniato in the time of Napoleon. After his expedition from Leghorn, he found in the little town the last of that branch of the Bonapartes, in the person of an old canon, Filippo Bonaparte, who made the young hero his heir, and died in the year 1799.
As regards the Bonapartes of Ajaccio, they can be traced with certainty as far back as Messire Francesco Bonaparte, who died in the year 1567. Without doubt, the Corsican branch of the family came over from Sarzana.
The following little table gives Napoleon's ancestry so far as it is known with certainty:—
| Francesco Bonaparte, 1567. | ||
| | | ||
| Gabriele Bonaparte Messire, Built towers in Ajaccio against the Saracens. | ||
| | | ||
| Geronimo Bonaparte Egregius, procurator nobilis, Head of the Senators of Ajaccio. | ||
| | | ||
| Francesco Bonaparte, Capitano of the Town. | ||
| | | | | |
| Sebastiano Bonaparte. | Fulvio Bonaparte. | |
| | | | | |
| Carlo Bonaparte, nobilis. | Ludovico Bonaparte, 1632, Married Maria of Gondi. | |
| | | ||
| Giuseppe Bonaparte. Senator of the Town. | ||
| | | | | |
| Sebastian Bonaparte, magnificus. Senator of the Town, 1760. | Luciano Bonaparte, Archidiaconus. | |
| | | ||
| Carlo Maria Bonaparte, Born 29th March 1746, Father of Napoleon, married Letitia Ramolino. | ||
The Bonapartes played no part in Corsican history. Influential in their own city, and honoured with titles of nobility by the Genoese, to whom Ajaccio was subject, they confined themselves to a share in the civic administration of the town. It is not till Carlo Bonaparte that the name acquires consideration throughout the whole of Corsica, and becomes to a certain extent historic.
Napoleon's father was born, as we have seen, on the 29th of March 1746, at Ajaccio, in a stormy time, when the Corsicans were mustering all their force to shake off the detested yoke of Genoa. Gaffori was then the leader of the Corsicans, and Pasquale still in banishment at Naples. It had become customary with the Bonapartes of Ajaccio, to send their children to complete their education in Tuscany, and particularly to let them study in Pisa. For the Bonapartes remembered their Florentine nobility, and never ceased to assert it. Carlo Bonaparte himself, called himself Nobile and Patrician of Florence. The young Carlo studied first at Paoli's newly founded University in Corte; and then went to Pisa, where many of his countrymen were his fellow-students. He studied jurisprudence; and it is said of him, that his talents and learning procured him respect, and his generosity attachment. Returning to his native country after graduating as Doctor of Laws, he soon became the most popular advocate in Ajaccio.
Carlo Bonaparte, with his prepossessing exterior, powerful intellect, and fervid eloquence, was not long in attracting the attention of Paoli, whose perception of character was acute. He began to employ him in business of state. In the year 1764, the young advocate became acquainted with the most beautiful girl in Ajaccio, Letitia Ramolino, at that time fourteen years of age. Both were warmly attached to each other; but the Ramolinos belonged to the Genoese party, and would not consent to their daughter's marriage with a Paolist. Paoli himself, however, interfered, gained the good-will of the parents, and obtained their permission. Letitia's mother had, as widow, married a Signor Fesch, captain of a Swiss regiment in the service of Genoa; Cardinal Fesch was their son.
Paoli, meanwhile, made the young Carlo Bonaparte his secretary, and took him with him to Corte, the seat of government. Letitia followed unwillingly. Corsican liberty was on the eve of its extinction; the French had already entered the island, after the treaty of Fontainebleau; and in the critical position of affairs, a parliament had assembled to decide upon the course to be followed. Carlo Bonaparte, in a fiery, patriotic speech, demanded war against France.
After the defeat at Ponte Nuovo, when the flight had become universal, and the French were already in the vicinity of Corte, some hundreds of families of the higher classes sought refuge on Monte Rotondo, and among them Carlo Bonaparte and his wife, who was then pregnant with Napoleon. The mountain presented a mournful spectacle of despairing, defenceless fugitives, of terrified women and children, who believed that their last hour was come. Several days of anguish and uncertainty passed in these rocky wilds among the goat-herds. At length French officers appeared on the mountain with a flag of truce, sent by Count Devaux, who had occupied Corte. They announced to the fugitives that the island had been conquered, that Paoli was about to leave it, and that they had nothing to fear, but might descend from the mountain to their homes. The fugitives immediately sent a deputation to Corte, at the head of which were Carlo Bonaparte and Lorenzo Giubega of Calvi, to obtain passes providing for the safety of all their families, furnished with which the deputation returned to Monte Rotondo, and brought their friends away.
Bonaparte descended with his wife into the little pastoral district of Niolo, taking this difficult route for Ajaccio. They had to pass the river Liamone, which was swollen, and Letitia was in danger of being drowned. Only her own courage and the activity of her attendants rescued her from the stream. Carlo Bonaparte now purposed to accompany Paoli, his patron and friend, into exile, holding it dishonourable to remain in Corsica now that the common fatherland had fallen under the yoke of the French. But the entreaties of his uncle, the Archdeacon Lucian, and the tears of his wife, induced him to relinquish this despairing thought. He remained on the island, returned to Ajaccio, and there, under the French government, became assessor in the Supreme Court. Marbœuf showed him many marks of distinction; and it was through his influence that Carlo procured for his eldest son Joseph a place in the seminary of Autun; and for his second son Napoleon, a cadetship in the military school of Brienne. It was Marbœuf, therefore, the conqueror of Corsica, who made the career of the young Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, possible. He was a frequent visitor at the house of the Bonapartes, and spent many agreeable hours in the society of the beautiful Madame Letitia; this, and the patronage which the French Count bestowed on Napoleon, gave occasion to the scandalous reports circulated by the enemies of the latter, that the gallant Frenchman had enjoyed the favours of Napoleon's handsome mother.
Marbœuf was himself, however, under obligation to Carlo Bonaparte. For when General Narbonne-Fritzlar was intriguing in Corsica against his countryman, in order to obtain the command of the island, Bonaparte had by his courage and energy prevailed with the French ministry to retain Marbœuf as governor. The count repaid this service with his friendship, his good offices, and the recommendation of the young military scholar Napoleon, to the influential family of Brienne. Carlo Bonaparte showed his attachment to Marbœuf in every possible way; I have read a sonnet of his addressed to the count, which I shall not communicate, as it contains nothing characteristic;—any cultivated Italian can write a tolerable sonnet in his native language.
In the year 1777, Napoleon's father was made deputy of the nobility for Corsica, and travelled to Paris by way of Florence. He visited the French capital a second time, in order to bring to a conclusion his process with the Jesuits of Ajaccio in regard to certain properties. While prosecuting this business he died, in February 1785, in his thirty-ninth year, of the same malady in the stomach, which was to prove fatal to his son Napoleon. The incoherent dreams of his deathbed ran always upon Napoleon—a proof that he centred his hopes upon this son; he cried, dying: "Where is Napoleon; why does he not come with his great sword to help his father?" He died in the arms of his son Joseph. They buried him in Montpellier. When Napoleon had become Emperor, the citizens of this town offered to erect a monument to his father. But Napoleon replied to their proposal, that they should allow the dead to rest; for if a statue were raised to his father, now so long dead, his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, might with equal justice demand a similar honour. Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, afterwards had his father's body disinterred and deposited in St. Leu.
Napoleon was at school in Paris, when Carlo Bonaparte died. The following is the letter which the youth of sixteen wrote to his mother on the occasion:—
"Paris, March 29, 1785.
"My dear Mother,—Time has to-day somewhat calmed the first outbreak of my sorrow; and I hasten to convince you of the gratitude with which your constant kindness to us has inspired me. Console yourself, my dear mother. Circumstances demand it. We shall redouble our care and our grateful attention, and shall be happy if we can in any degree compensate to you by our obedience, for the incalculable loss of a beloved husband. I conclude, my dear mother—my grief compels me; while, at the same time, I beg you to moderate your own. My health is excellent, and I pray Heaven every day that yours may be equally good. Give my respects to aunt Gertrude, Minana Saveria, Minana Fesch, &c.
"P.S.—The queen of France was confined of a prince, named the Duke of Normandy, on the 27th of March, at seven o'clock in the evening.—Your very devoted and affectionate son,
"Napoleon de Bonaparte."
If this laconic epistle of the young Napoleon is genuine, it is of some value.
Carlo Bonaparte was a man of brilliant talent and clear intellect, an impassioned orator, a patriot, and yet, as we have seen, capable of adapting himself to circumstances, and not wanting in political prudence. He was fond of splendid living, and his expenditure was lavish. Madame Letitia was only thirty-five years old at his death, and had already borne him thirteen children, five of whom were dead. Jerome was an infant in the cradle.
The Archdeacon Lucian now became the head of the house and proved himself a careful and frugal steward of the family property. The Bonapartes owned some lands, some vineyards, and herds.
CHAPTER IV.
THE BOY NAPOLEON.
"I too am a mortal man
Like others, born
Of the race of him who was first made."
Wisdom of Solomon.
We dwell with singular interest on the childhood of extraordinary men; the imagination pleases itself with the picture of the boy still lost among his play-fellows, and unconscious of his destiny. We are tempted to guess, in the physiognomy of the child, the traits that mark his future greatness as a man; but childhood is a deep mystery; who shall distinguish in the soul of a child the form of the genius or the demon that sleeps therein?—who prophesy of the mysterious power that is suddenly to determine the vast and slumbering forces, and send them forth commissioned into space and time?
I once saw in Florence the marble bust of a boy. The innocent smile on the childish face attracted me, and I contemplated it with pleasure. On the pedestal was inscribed: Nero.
Little is known of Napoleon's infancy. His mother Letitia was in church at the festival of the Assunta of the Virgin when she felt the first pangs of approaching labour. She immediately hastened home; but had not time to gain her own room, and gave birth to her child in a small cabinet, on a temporary couch of tapestry representing scenes from the Iliad. Gertrude, her sister-in-law, attended her. It was eleven o'clock in the forenoon when Napoleon came to the world.
He was not baptized till the 21st of July 1771, nearly two years after his birth, along with his sister Maria Anna, who died soon after. It is said that he resisted vehemently when the priest was about to sprinkle the consecrated water on him; perhaps he wanted to baptize himself, as at a later period he crowned himself, taking the crown from the hands of the Pope when he was about to set it on his head.
His boyhood showed symptoms of a vehement and passionate temperament, and he was at perpetual variance with his eldest brother Joseph. In these childish quarrels Joseph had always the worst of it, and was rudely handled; and when he ran to complain, Napoleon was declared to be in the right. Joseph became at last quite submissive to his younger brother, and the family began very early to look upon Napoleon as taking the lead among his brothers and sisters. The Archdeacon Lucian said to Joseph on his deathbed, "You are the oldest of the family, but there stands its head—you must not forget that."
We are willing enough to believe that the boy Napoleon showed a quite indomitable passion for everything military, and that this born soldier liked nothing so well as to run by the side of the soldiery of Ajaccio. The soldiers had a pleasure in seeing the boy go through the exercise beside them, and many a grayhaired veteran lifted him in his arms and caressed him for imitating the drill so valiantly. He teased his father till he purchased him a cannon, and the toy was long shown in the house of the Bonapartes with which he used to make his mimic battle-thunder, and play the cloud-compelling Jove. He soon began to exercise empire over the youth of Ajaccio, and, like Cyrus with the shepherd-boys of the Medes, and Peter the Great with his play-fellows, he formed the children of Ajaccio into a regiment of soldiers, who bravely took the field against the youngsters of the Borgo of Ajaccio, and fought sanguinary engagements with stones and wooden sabres.
In the year 1778, his father took him to the military school of Brienne, where the afterwards celebrated Pichegru was his master. It is known that Napoleon here at first showed himself quiet, gentle, and diligent. His impassioned temperament broke out only occasionally when his delicate sense of honour was touched. His quartermaster one day condemned him for some fault to eat his dinner on his knees in the woollen dress of disgrace, at the door of the refectory. Such a dinner was more than the pride of the young Corsican could stomach; he had an attack of vomiting and a fit. The Père Petrault immediately freed him from the punishment, and made it matter of complaint that his best mathematician was treated so shamefully.
In 1783, Napoleon went to the military school of Paris to complete his studies, already a completely-formed character, highly cultivated, glowing with the fires of genius and of youth, his head full of the heroes of his favourite Plutarch, and his heart penetrated with the deeds of his great Corsican forefathers. Society had already begun to ferment, and coming great events threw their shadow forward on the time. It was a period worth living in, heaving with mighty energies, big with change, and full of creative, Titanic impetuosity; it had given Nature the command to prepare great men.
The young officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, joined his regiment in Valence in the year 1785. His soul, profoundly though uncertainly stirred, needed expression. He wrote on the theme proposed for a prize essay by the Academy of Lyons: "What are the Principles and the Institutions which we must give to mankind to make them happy?"—a favourite subject in that humanistic period. Napoleon wrote anonymously. When he had become Emperor, and Talleyrand had extracted the paper from among the archives of Lyons to flatter the potentate, he threw it into the fire. Sentimentality was one of the features of the age, and we see that the young philanthropist did not escape without paying tribute to his time. What if Napoleon should have become the popular author of a sentimental romance in the vein of Richardson and Sterne? He had undertaken a journey to Mount Cenis with his friend Demarris, and on his return, agreeably excited by his little love-affair with Mademoiselle Colombier of Valence, who gave him secret rendezvous and very innocent banquets of cherries, he sat down to write a Sentimental Journey on Mount Cenis. He did not get far with it; but this fit of tender susceptibility in Napoleon is remarkable—and had he not "The Sorrows of Werther" with him in Egypt?
Still body and soul a Corsican, he also wrote in Valence a History of the Corsicans—a theme that suited the young Napoleon well. The manuscript exists in an incomplete state in the Library at Paris, and is now about to be published. Napoleon sent his manuscript to Paoli, whom he admired, and who was at that time living in exile in London. The following is part of the letter to his great countryman, which accompanied it:—
"I was born when our country died. Three thousand Frenchmen infesting our island, the throne of freedom sinking in waves of blood—such was the detested spectacle that first shocked my gaze. The groans of the dying, the sighs of the oppressed, the tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from the moment I was born.
"You left Corsica, and with you vanished the hopes of better fortune; slavery was the tribute we had to pay to conquest. Under an accumulation of burdens—under the threefold chain of the soldier, the legislator, and the tax-gatherer—our countrymen lived on in contempt,... despised by those who had the reins of government in their hands. Is not this the most cruel torture that any one possessed of feeling can have to suffer?
"The traitors to their country—the venal souls whom the love of base hire corrupts—have disseminated calumnies against the national Government, and against you personally. Authors adopt them, and transmit them as truths to posterity.
"Reading them, I was fired with indignation, and I have resolved to dissipate these mischievous falsehoods—the children of ignorance. An early-commenced study of the French language, attentive observation, and memorabilia extracted from the papers of the patriots, put me in a position even to hope for some success.... I shall compare your Government with the present.... I shall paint the betrayers of the common cause, with the pencil of shame, in black.... I shall summon those in power before the bar of public opinion, give the minutest details of their vexatious system of oppression, disclose their secret intrigues, and, if possible, interest the virtuous minister who at present governs the State, for the lamentable fate which keeps us so cruelly prostrate."
Such are the sentiments and language of the young Corsican, Napoleon—the revolutionary democrat and scholar of Plutarch. In his History of the Corsicans, he says in one place: "When his country is no more, a high-spirited citizen should die." These were, in those days, no mere phrases from Tacitus; they were the glowing language of a young soul capable of all that was great and noble. There is hardly another character whose development—rapid as the flush of youth and genius can make it—we follow with the same passionate delight as we do that of the young hero, Napoleon, till about the peace of Campio Formio. We see a more than ordinary man—a demigod passing before us, still uncontaminated by the foul touch of selfishness—till the fair picture gradually becomes blurred, and we class it with those of ordinary despots. For no greatness endures, and Macchiavelli is right: "There are none but ordinary men." Other youthful literary attempts of Napoleon are mentioned by his biographers, and they are now to be printed; among them two novels, Le Comte d'Essex, and Le Masque Prophête, and a dialogue on Love, entitled Giulio.
Napoleon visited Ajaccio every year, and made his influence be felt on the education of his brothers and sisters. They were brought up simply, after the fashion of their country, and with a primitive strictness. "It was almost," says Nasica, "as if you were living in a convent. Prayers, sleep, study, refreshment, pleasure, promenade—everything went by rule and measure. The greatest harmony, a tender and sincere affection, prevailed among all the members of the family. It was in those days a pattern to the town, as it afterwards became its ornament and boast."
The Archdeacon Lucian managed the family affairs economically; and it cost the young Napoleon great exertion to obtain a little additional money to meet his expenses. But he obtained it. The whole family felt the influence of the young man, and was subject to the sway of this born ruler. It is characteristic—since empire was his destiny—that he, the second-born, has not only the mastery of his younger brothers and sisters, but even of his elder brother, and that his interference has a decisive effect on their upbringing. It was soon quite well understood that the young Napoleon was to be obeyed.
I find an authentic letter of Napoleon to his uncle Fesch, afterwards the Cardinal, dated from Brienne, the 15th July 1784. The boy of fifteen, in writing here as to the career on which his eldest brother Joseph ought to enter, speaks in the clearest and most sensible way of the circumstances necessary to be taken into account. The letter is sufficiently well worth reading—especially if we consider that the Joseph of whom so many doubts are therein expressed, afterwards became King of Spain.
NAPOLEON TO HIS UNCLE FESCH.
"My dear Uncle,—I write to inform you of the journey of my dear father over Brienne to Paris, where he has gone in order to take Marianne (afterwards Eliza of Tuscany) to St. Cyr, and to re-establish his health. He arrived here on the 21st with Lucian, and the two demoiselles whom you saw: he has left Lucian here. He is nine years old, and three feet, eleven inches, ten lines high: he is in the sixth in Latin, and will learn the various branches taught in this school; he shows much talent and willingness, and we may hope that something will come of him (que ce sera un bon sujet). [Lucian was the only one of the family who scorned a crown.] He is healthy, he is strong, lively, and thoughtless, and, in the meantime, his masters are content with him. He knows French very well, and has completely forgotten his Italian; but he will write to you along with this, and I shall say nothing to him, that you may see how matters stand with him.
"I hope he will write to you oftener now, than he did when he was in Autun.... I am confident my brother Joseph has not written to you yet. How could you expect it? He sends my dear father, when he does write to him, at most two lines. He is, in truth, quite changed. He writes to me, however, frequently. He is in the rhetoric class; and he would do better if he were diligent, for the master told my dear father that there was no one in the college (at Autun) who showed more talent than he in physics, rhetoric, or philosophy, or who could make so good a translation. In regard to the profession he is to follow, you know he at first chose the clerical. He kept by this resolution up till the present hour, but he now wishes to serve the king. In this he is wrong, on several grounds.
"1. As my father remarks, he has not courage to face the dangers of a battle; his weak health does not allow of his enduring the fatigues of a campaign; and my brother looks at the life of a soldier only from the garrison side. Yes, my dear brother will make an excellent officer in garrison. Well, as he is light-minded, and therefore clever at making frivolous compliments, he will always, with his talents, make a good figure in society—but in a battle? It is about this my dear father is dubious.
Qu'importe à des guerriers ces frivoles avantages?
Que sont tous ces trésors sans celui du courage?
A ce prix fussiez vous aussi beau qu'Adonis,
Du Dieu même du Pinde eussiez-vous l'éloquence,
Que sont tous ces dons sans celui de la vaillance?
"2. He has received an education for the clerical profession; it is too late to forget it. The Bishop of Autun would have given him a large benefice, and he was certain to have become a bishop. What an advantage for the family! The Bishop of Autun has done all he could to prevail on him to stay, and has promised him that he never would have cause to repent it. In vain!—he persists. I commend his resolution, if he has a decided taste for this profession—the finest of all professions—and if the Great Mover of human things (le Grand Moteur des choses humaines) had, in forming him, given him, as He has given me, a decided inclination for a military life.
"3. He wishes to obtain a commission; that is very well, but in what corps? In the marine, perhaps. 4. He knows nothing of mathematics. It would take him two years to learn them. 5. The sea does not agree with his health. Perhaps among the engineers? Then he would require four or five years to master what is necessary. Moreover, I think that to work and be occupied the whole day does not suit the levity of his disposition. The same reason exists for his not joining the artillery as for the engineers, with the exception that he would only have to work eighteen months to become élève, and as many to be made officer. Oh! but that is still not his taste. Let us see, then—doubtless he wishes to join the infantry. Good! I understand; he wants to have nothing to do the whole day but wear the pavement; but what is an insignificant infantry officer?—a mauvais sujet for three-fourths of his time. And neither my father, nor you, nor my mother will hear of this, nor my uncle the archdeacon, for he has already given some little specimens of lightheadedness and extravagance. It follows that a last attempt must be made to gain him for the clerical profession; if this cannot be done, my dear father will take him with him to Corsica, where he will be under his own eye. They will try to make a law-clerk of him. I conclude by begging that you will continue your good-will towards me; to make myself worthy of it will be my chief and my most agreeable duty. I am, with the most profound respect, my dear uncle, your very devoted and very obedient servant and nephew,
"Napoleon de Bonaparte.
"P.S.—Tear this letter.
"We may hope, nevertheless, that Joseph, with the talents he possesses, and the sentiments with which his education must have inspired him, will think better of it, and become the stay of our family. Represent to him a little these advantages."
Have we not almost a right to doubt that a boy of fifteen can have written so self-conscious, so clear and decisive a letter? It has never hitherto been published anywhere but in the work of Tommaseo—Letters of Pasquale Paoli—where I found it; the author says he owes it to Signor Lucgi Biadelli, councillor at the Supreme Court of Bastia. The letter appears to me to be an invaluable document; we seem to be present at the family council of the Bonapartes, and have all its members vividly before our eyes. Monsieur Fesch in Ajaccio, when he received the letter with the news about the giddy Joseph, wore his woollen blouse, and had his little wooden pipe in his mouth, precisely as many eye-witnesses remember to have seen him. Later, he wore the cardinal's hat; and the light-headed young Joseph became king of Spain.
We can recognise, in the Napoleon of this letter, the future tyrant of his family. We here find him caring for his brothers—pondering over their prospects; afterwards, he gave them kingly crowns, and demanded unconditional obedience. The plain citizen Lucian, and Louis King of Holland, alone withstood his tyranny.
CHAPTER V.
NAPOLEON AS ZEALOUS DEMOCRAT.
When Napoleon came on a visit to Ajaccio, he liked to live and work in Milelli—a little country-house in the neighbourhood of Ajaccio belonging to the family—where the old oak-tree may still be seen under which the stripling Bonaparte used to sit and dream, and anxiously revolve his plans of life.
The French Revolution came, the storming of the Bastille, the overthrow of the existing state of things.
The young Napoleon threw himself, with all the force of his impassioned nature, into the excitement of the time. Destiny, however, did not mean him to exhaust his energies in the struggle of the revolutionary parties; it had reserved him for something else. At a distance from Paris, and on his own little island, he was to play a merely preparatory part in the first stormy agitations of the new period. Corsica became his school.
We find him in Ajaccio as a young, enthusiastic revolutionist, declaiming in the clubs, writing addresses, helping to organize the national guard—in short, playing the great politician precisely in the way we are acquainted with from our own experience.
Ajaccio was at that time the centre of the Corsican revolutionists; the house of the Bonapartes their place of meeting; the two brothers, Joseph and Napoleon, undisputed leaders of the democracy. The little town was in a state of wild uproar. The commotion appeared to General Barrin, at that time in command of the island, of a threatening character; and he sent Gaffori's son, Marshal Francesco Gaffori, to check it. Gaffori was by no means successful in this; on the contrary, he was glad to find hospitality and protection in the house of Bacciocchi, afterwards Prince of Lucca and Piombino.
Napoleon and Joseph, meanwhile, assembled the democratic party in the Church of San Francesco, and prepared a congratulatory address to the Constituent Assembly, which contained at the same time the bitterest complaints of the oppressive character of the existing administration in Corsica, and expressed an urgent wish that the island should be declared an integral part of France.
Napoleon understood his time: renouncing his Corsican patriotism, he became decidedly French, and threw himself into the arms of the Revolution.
He returned to Valence in 1789; and soon after he is again in Ajaccio, where the active Joseph, while the national guard was in the process of formation, was zealously exerting himself to obtain an officer's commission. Marius Peraldi, the richest man in Ajaccio, and an enemy of the Bonaparte family, was made colonel of the national guard, and Joseph an officer.
It had in the meantime been proposed in Corsica to recall the exiles; and by the exertions of the two brothers Bonaparte and the Abbot Coti, the Corsican General Assembly was induced to name four deputies, who were to meet Paoli in France, and conduct him to the island. Among these was Marius Peraldi, and both Napoleon and Joseph accompanied the deputation.
When Paoli arrived in Paris, the Constituent Assembly had already (1st December 1789) incorporated Corsica with France, by a decree which for ever put an end to the political independence of the island. Mirabeau and Saliceti—Corsican deputy for the Third Estate, afterwards the celebrated statesman, and minister of Murat in Naples—proposed the resolution.
Napoleon himself hastened to Marseilles to welcome Paoli, and was witness to the tears of joy which the noble patriot shed when he again set foot on his native soil in Cape Corso. An assembly met in Orezza to deliberate on and regulate the affairs of the island. Napoleon and his foe, the young Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, earned here, at the elections, the first honours as public speakers. Carlo Bonaparte's son could not but attract the attention of Paoli, who, astonished at the exuberance of intellectual resource and unerring judgment of the young man, is said to have expressed himself with regard to him in these terms: "This young man has a career before him; he needs nothing but the opportunity, to be one of Plutarch's men." It is related that Paoli on one occasion entered a locanda, and finding the rooms in disorder, was told in explanation by the landlord that a young man, by name Bonaparte, had been lodging there; had written day and night, and constantly torn what he wrote to pieces; had run restlessly up and down, and at last started off for the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo.
The young Napoleon had left no stone unturned to procure his brother Joseph the presidency of the district of Ajaccio, travelling as an adroit partisan through the villages of the region, soliciting votes, and spending money.
In Ajaccio he was indefatigably occupied in keeping the republican club at the due heat, and thwarting the priests and the aristocrats. A sanguinary struggle took place between the two parties in the little town; Napoleon's life was endangered, and an officer of the national guard was killed by his side. He narrates the details in a manifesto of his own composition. Blood continued to be shed for several days and several times the lives of Joseph and Napoleon were a stake.
Napoleon was considered the soul of the club of Ajaccio. Reminding us of the young politicians of our late popular commotions, we see him fulminate a stinging address against an aristocrat—Count Matteo Buttafuoco, the same who had invited Rousseau to Vescovato, and who, during the Corsican war of independence, had served in the French army, and lent the enemies of his country his arm against his country's cause. He was deputy of the nobility for Corsica, had voted in Versailles against the union of the Estates, and made himself odious by other votes of aristocratic and unpopular tendency. Against this man the young Napoleon wrote a manifesto in his country house at Milelli, which he printed in Dôle, and then sent to the club of Ajaccio. The pamphlet, rhetorical and impassioned, but substantially based on fact, is a notable contribution to our acquaintance with Napoleon. It has all the bold, poetic exuberance of diction characteristic of young revolutionists; and as I read it in this solitude of Ajaccio, it awakened in me amusing recollections of the years 1848 and 1849. But it is more than the mere pamphlet of a young demagogue—it is a preparatory exercise for the imperial edicts; it is the Emperor himself trying his wings. This manifesto is indispensable if we are desirous of insight into the nature and growth of Napoleon in the earlier periods of his development.
LETTER OF MONSIEUR BONAPARTE TO M. MATTEO BUTTAFUOCO, CORSICAN DEPUTY TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY.
"Monsieur,—From Bonifazio to Cape Corso, from Ajaccio to Bastia, is but one chorus of curses upon you. Your friends hide themselves, your relatives disown you; and even the prudent man, who never allows himself to be mastered by popular opinion, is this time carried away by the general indignation.
"What is it you have done, then? What are the crimes that can legitimate an animosity so universal, and a desertion so complete? This, Monsieur, is precisely what I am about to investigate, by the aid of light which you yourself shall supply.
"The history of your life, at least since you were thrown upon the stage of public affairs, is known. Its main features are drawn here in characters of blood. There are details, however, not so generally known; I may therefore make mistakes, but I count upon your indulgence, and on your correcting them.
"After entering the service of France, you returned to see your relations; you found the tyrants beaten, the national government established, and the Corsicans, animated by the most generous sentiments, emulating each other in making daily sacrifices for the public weal. You, Monsieur, did not allow yourself to be led astray by the general ferment; far from it; you listened only with compassion to the babble of fatherland, freedom, independence, and constitution, with which the demagogues had been puffing up our meanest peasants. Profound reflection had taught you to estimate at its proper value this artificial excitement, which can only be maintained at the expense of the community. Of course the peasant must labour, and not act the hero, if he is not to die of hunger, but to bring up his family, and respect the authorities. As regards the persons who by their rank or good fortune are called to rule, it is impossible that they can for any length of time be so stupid as to sacrifice their ease and their influence to a chimera, and that they should stoop to pay court to a cobbler, for the sake of playing the Brutus. However, when you fell upon the project of gaining the friendship of Monsieur Paoli, it was necessary you should dissemble. Monsieur Paoli was the centre of all national movement. We will not deny him talent, nor even genius, of a certain kind; he had for a while made the affairs of the island flourish; he had founded a university, in which, for the first time since the creation, perhaps, those sciences which further the development of the mind were taught among our mountains; he had increased our means of defence by establishing an iron-foundry and powder-mills, and by erecting fortifications; he had opened ports which by encouraging commerce enlivened agriculture; he had created a marine which favoured our communications, while it was destructive to our enemies—and all that he had thus begun, was but the indication of what he would one day have accomplished. Harmony, peace, and freedom were the forerunners of national prosperity—had it not been, that, as you had discovered, an ill-organized government, constructed on a false basis, was the still surer omen of the misfortunes into which the nation was to be plunged.
"Paoli's dream was to play the Solon, but he copied his model badly. He had put everything into the hands of the people, or its representatives, so that one could not exist except at its pleasure. Strange mistake, to subordinate to a day-labourer, a man who by education, birth, and fortune, is destined to rule! Such a palpable perversion of reason cannot fail, in the long-run, to produce the ruin and dissolution of the body politic, after it has brought it into uproar by every species of abuse.
"You succeeded according to your wish. Monsieur Paoli, continually surrounded by hot-headed enthusiasts, did not conceive it possible that a man could have any other passion than the fanaticism of freedom and independence. Through certain French introductions, you procured his intimacy, and he did not take time to test your moral principle by anything deeper than your words. By his influence you were chosen to conduct the negotiations in Versailles, in regard to the settlement of affairs which was effected through the mediation of the French cabinet. Monsieur de Choiseul saw you and understood you. Men know in an instant how to estimate souls of a certain stamp. Very soon you transformed yourself from the representative of a free people into the agent of a satrap. You communicated to him the instructions, the projects, the secrets, of the cabinet of Corte.
"This conduct, which people here find base and shameless, I, for my part, find quite simple; after all, in every sort of affair, the important point is to have a clear eye and a cool judgment.
"The prude judges the coquette, and thereby makes herself ridiculous; that is her history in a few words.
"A man of principle would judge you very severely; but you do not believe in men of principle. The common man, who is constantly misled by virtuous demagogues, can have no consideration from you, who do not believe in virtue. Your own principles alone must pronounce sentence upon you, like the laws upon a criminal; but those who know what supple policy means, find nothing but the greatest simplicity in your mode of acting; we come to the same result as before, therefore—in every sort of affair we must first see clearly, and then judge calmly. As to other matters, you can defend yourself no less victoriously, for you have not coveted the reputation of a Cato or Catinat; it is sufficient for you to resemble a certain class; and, with this class, it is a received dogma, that he who can have money and does not use it, is a simpleton, since money procures all the pleasures of the senses, and nothing is of any value but these pleasures. The liberal Monsieur de Choiseul accordingly was sufficiently pressing in his offers, whereas your own ridiculous country, according to its pleasant custom, repaid your services with the honour of serving it.
"When the treaty of Compiègne had been concluded, Monsieur de Chauvelin landed with twenty-four battalions on our coasts. Monsieur de Choiseul, who attached the utmost importance to the speedy accomplishment of the objects of the expedition, became so uneasy that he could not conceal his anxiety from you—you advised him to send you here with a few millions. As Philip took cities with his sumpter-mule, you promised to overcome every obstacle, and produce complete subjection.... No sooner said than done; you hastened over the sea, threw off the mask, and, with money and promotion in your hand, you opened communications with those whom you considered most accessible.
"The Corsican cabinet had no idea that a Corsican could love himself more than his country—it had intrusted you with its interests. As you, on the other hand, had no idea that a man could not love money and himself more than his country, you sold yourself and hoped to buy every one else. Profound moralist! you knew the price of each man's fanaticism. A few pounds of gold more or less, were for you the shades of difference in character!
"You deceived yourself, however; the weak were perhaps shaken, but they were shocked at the frightful thought of lacerating the bosom of their country; they imagined they saw their fathers, their brothers, or their friends, who had perished in its defence, rising from their graves to overwhelm them with curses. These ridiculous prejudices were powerful enough to check you in your career. You sighed that you had to deal with a childish people; but, Monsieur, such refined sentiments as yours are not given to the multitude, and they live on in poverty and wretchedness, while the prudent man, as soon as circumstances become in any degree favourable to him, knows how to rise. And that is pretty nearly the moral of your history.
"In giving account of the obstacles which interfered with the fulfilment of your promises, you proposed that the Royal-Corse regiment should be sent here. You hoped that its example would convert our too good and too simple peasantry; that it would accustom them to a thing in which they found so much that was repulsive—but you were deceived in this hope too. Did not Rossi, Marengo, and some other fools, excite such an enthusiasm in this regiment, that the collective officers declared, in an authentic document, that they would rather send back their commissions than break their oath, or be unfaithful to still more sacred duties?
"You found yourself compelled to set the example yourself. Not at all disconcerted, you threw yourself into Vescovato, at the head of some friends and a detachment of French soldiers; but the terrible Clemens hunted you from the nest. You retired to Bastia with the companions of your adventure, and with your family. This little affair did not bring you much honour; your house, and the houses of your associates, were burnt down. In your place of security, you mocked at these impotent exertions of a dying cause.
"It is boldly affirmed here, that you wished to arm the Royal-Corse against its own brothers. And, in the same spirit, people are inclined to call your courage in question, on account of your slight defence of Vescovato. These are useless imputations. For the first is an immediate consequence, is a means for the execution, of your projects; and as we have affirmed that your mode of acting has been very simple, it follows that this incidental accusation is done away with. As regards your want of courage, I do not see that this is proved by the action of Vescovato; you did not go there to make war in earnest, but to encourage, by your example, those of the opposite party who already wavered. And then, what right had people to demand that you should have risked the fruit of two years' good behaviour, in order to let yourself be killed like a common soldier? But you must have been moved when you saw your house, and the houses of your friends, become the prey of the flames. Good God! when will silly mortals cease to take everything so seriously? When you allowed your house to be burnt, you compelled Monsieur de Choiseul to compensate you. The issue has confirmed the correctness of your calculations; you have been paid far beyond the value of what you lost. It is true, complaints have been made that you kept everything for yourself, and gave only a trifle to the wretched men you had corrupted. In order to know to what length you were capable of going, we only require to see how far you could go with safety; now, poor people, who were so much in need of your protection, were neither in a position to assert their claims, nor even to see clearly the wrong that was done them; they dared not exhibit their discontent, and rebel against your authority; detested by their countrymen, their return would not have been so much as safe. It is, therefore, natural that when you found a few thousands of dollars among your fingers, you did not allow them to slip through; that would have been stupid.
"The French, defeated notwithstanding their gold, their commissions, the discipline of their numerous battalions, the lightness of their squadrons, and the skill of their artillery, routed at Penta, at Vescovato, at Oreto, at San Nicolao, at Borgo, Borbaggio, and Oletta, retired behind their entrenchments completely discouraged. The winter, the time of their repose, was for you, Monsieur, a period of the greatest diligence; and though you could not triumph over the obstinacy of prejudices deeply-rooted in the minds of the people, you succeeded in corrupting some of their leaders, whom you robbed of their nobler sentiments, though with difficulty; and this, and the thirty battalions that Monsieur de Vaux brought with him in spring, made Corsica bow her neck to the yoke, and forced Paoli and the most enthusiastic to retire.
"A number of the patriots had fallen in the defence of their independence, others had fled a proscribed country—now the loathsome nest of tyranny; but many had neither died nor been able to flee, they became the objects of persecution. Souls that had proved themselves superior to corruption were of another stamp. The French supremacy could only be secured by their complete extinction. Ah! this plan was but too punctually executed. Some died the victims of supposititious crimes; others, betrayed by those to whom they had extended their hospitality and their confidence, expired upon the scaffold, repressing their tears. Great numbers, immured by Narbonne-Fritzlar in the jail of Toulon, poisoned by bad food, tortured by their chains, loaded with every species of misusage, lived for some time in the spasms of the death-struggle, only to see death slowly approaching.... O God, witness of their innocence, why hast Thou not made Thyself their avenger?
"In this general misery, in the midst of the cries and groans of this unhappy people, you began meanwhile to enjoy the fruits of your labour. Honours, titles, pensions rained upon you; your possessions would have increased still more rapidly if Madame Dubarry, occasioning the fall of Monsieur de Choiseul, had not deprived you of a protector who knew how to estimate your services. The blow did not discourage you; you re-established yourself by your activity in the subordinate bureaus; you saw nothing in it but the necessity of increasing your diligence. People in higher quarters found themselves flattered, your services were so notorious!... Nothing was withheld from you. Not content with the lake of Biguglia, you requested portions of the lands of several communes. How could you rob them of these? people ask. I, for my part, ask: What consideration could you be expected to have for a nation which you knew detested you?
"Your favourite project was the division of the island among ten barons. What! not content with helping to forge the chains of your country, you proposed also to subject it to an absurd feudalism! But I commend you for doing the Corsicans all the harm that was in your power; you were at war with them, and in war it is an axiom to do hurt for your own advantage.
"But passing all this wretched business, let us come to the present, and conclude a letter, the shocking length of which cannot but have tired you.
"The posture of affairs in France was ominous of extraordinary events; you dreaded their effect in Corsica. The same madness with which we were possessed before the war, began again, to your great annoyance, to deprive this amiable people of its senses. You saw what would be the consequence; for, if generous sentiments were to sway public opinion, from an honest man you became a mere traitor; if these generous sentiments stirred the blood of our fiery fellow-citizens, something more wretched still; if a national government followed, what was to become of you? Your conscience accordingly began to make you uneasy. Frightened, cast down, you still did not despair; you resolved to stake your all, but you did it like a man of sense; you took a wife to strengthen your connexions. A worthy man, who, trusting to your honour, had given his sister to your nephew, saw himself deceived. Your nephew, whose paternal inheritance you had devoured to increase a property that should have been his, found himself with a numerous family plunged into misery.
"When you had arranged your private affairs, you threw a glance upon the country. You saw it reeking with the blood of its martyrs, covered with victims, and everywhere breathing nothing but thoughts of vengeance. You saw the reckless soldier, the impudent official, the greedy tax-gatherer, lording it with none to gainsay, while the Corsican, loaded with the triple chain, did not dare to think either on what he was, or on what he might yet be. In the joy of your heart you said to yourself: 'Matters are going on well, the only point is now to preserve them as they are, and forthwith you banded yourself with the soldier, the official, and the farmer of the revenue. All your aims were now centred on obtaining deputies inspired with similar sentiments; for, as concerned yourself, you could not imagine that a nation hostile to you would elect you as its representative. But you were destined to alter this opinion when the writs, with a perhaps intentional absurdity, ordered that the deputy of the nobility should be elected in an assembly composed of only twenty-two persons—all that was necessary was to gain twelve votes. Your associates of the Supreme Council were exceedingly active; threats, promises, caresses, everything was tried: you were successful. Your candidates in the communes were not: your First President was rejected, and two men—in your opinion, of extreme ideas—the one was son, brother, nephew of the most zealous defenders of the people's cause; the other had seen Sionville and Narbonne, and, sighing over his impotence, well remembered the atrocities which he had witnessed—these two men were proclaimed, and met the wishes of the nation, whose hope they became. The secret indignation, the rage, which seized on every one, when you were elected, does honour to your intrigues, and the influence of your associates.
"On arriving in Versailles, you became a zealous royalist; in Paris you saw, to your great affliction, that the government which was being erected on the ruins of the fallen system, was the same which among us had been drowned in so much blood.
"All the exertions of the despotic party were powerless; the new constitution, the admiration of Europe, has become an object of solicitude to every thinking being. There remained for you but one means of rescue, and that was, to make it be believed that this constitution was not fitted for our island, although it was precisely the same as that which had worked so prosperously, and to deprive us of which had cost so much blood.
"All the deputies of the old administration, entering as a matter of course into your cabals, served you with the warmth of men seeking their own interest. You drew up memorials in which you affirmed that the advantages of the existing government among us were matter of experience, and in which it was represented that any alteration was contrary to the wishes of the nation. At this time the town of Ajaccio got wind of your machinations; she raised her head, formed her National Guard, organized her committee. This, intervening so unexpectedly, alarmed you. The excitement spread. You persuaded the minister, of whom you had the advantage in knowledge of Corsican affairs, that it was necessary to send your father-in-law, Monsieur Gaffori, to the island, the worthy forerunner of Monsieur Narbonne; and Monsieur Gaffori, at the head of his troops, had the impudence to attempt to maintain by violence the tyranny which his father, of glorious memory, had by his genius beaten and suppressed. Innumerable blunders disclosed the mediocre talent of your father-in-law: the only art be possessed was that of making himself enemies. On every side people were uniting against him. In this imminent danger you lifted up your eyes and saw Narbonne. Narbonne, seizing a favourable moment, had formed the plan of establishing in an island which he had desolated by unheard-of cruelties, the despotism which tormented his own conscience. You assent: the plan is adopted, five thousand men receive orders; the decree directing the provincial regiment to be increased by a battalion, is despatched; Narbonne himself sets off. This poor nation without arms, without spirit to resist, is delivered, hopeless and helpless, into the hands of its executioner.
"O unhappy fellow-citizens, what detestable intrigues were you to be the victims of! You would not have understood them till it was too late. Where were your means of withstanding, without arms, ten thousand men? You yourselves would have signed the act of your degradation, hope would have fled, hope would have been extinguished, and days of misery would have succeeded each other without intermission. Liberated France would have looked on you with contempt, afflicted Italy with indignation, and Europe, astonished at a humiliation so profound, would have torn from her annals the pages that do your virtues honour. But the deputies of your communes penetrated the design, and put you on your guard in time. A king, who has constantly desired only the happiness of his people, informed by Monsieur Lafayette, that steadfast friend of liberty, of the true state of the case, was able to crush the perfidious machinations of a minister whom revenge ceaselessly spurred on to injure you. Ajaccio showed itself resolute in its address; the lamentable condition into which the most despotic of all governments had brought you had there been so powerfully impressed on people's minds. The hitherto slumbering Bastia awoke at the sound of danger, and seized its weapons with that resolution which has ever characterized it. Arena came from Paris to Balagna full of those sentiments which make a man capable of undertaking everything, and of fearing no danger. His weapons in the one hand, the decrees of the National Assembly in the other, he made the people's enemies turn pale. Achille Murati, the conqueror of Capraja, who carried despair into Genoa itself, and who wanted but opportunity and a wider field to be a Turenne, reminded the sharers of his fame that it was time to win it over again, and that their country needed—not intrigue, which it never understood—but steel and fire. Before the rising din of a resistance so universal, Gaffori withdrew into the nothingness from which intrigue had made him emerge against his will. He remained trembling in the fortress of Corte. Narbonne hastened away from Lyons to bury his shame and his hellish plans in Rome. A few days later, and Corsica is linked to France, Paoli is recalled, and in a single instant your prospects are changed, and a new career offered you for which you would never have ventured to hope.
"Excuse me, Monsieur, excuse me; I took my pen to defend you, but my heart utterly revolted against a system which brought treachery and perfidy in its train. What! son of this same fatherland, have you never had a filial feeling towards it? What! was there no emotion in your heart at the sight of the rocks, the trees, the houses, the neighbourhoods, which were the scene of your sports in childhood? When you came to the world, it carried you on its bosom, it nourished you with its fruits. When you came to years of discretion, it set its hopes upon you, it honoured you with its confidence, it said to you: 'My son, you see the wretched state to which the injustice of men has brought me; collecting my energies in my passionate grief, I once more attain a vigour which promises me sure and infallible restoration; but I am threatened anew; hasten, my son, to Versailles; inform the great king better, dissipate his suspicions, implore his friendship.'
"Well, and what then? A little gold made you a betrayer of the trust your country had reposed in you; for the sake of a little gold you were soon seen with the parricidal sword in your hand lacerating its bosom. Ah! Monsieur, I am far from wishing you any harm; but tremble ... there are pangs of conscience that avenge. Your fellow-citizens, who abhor you, will enlighten France as to your true character. The estates and the pensions, the fruit of your treasons, will be taken from you. Bowed down by age and misery, in the horrible solitude of crime, you will live long enough to be tormented by your conscience. The father will point you out to his son, the teacher to his scholar, and say: "Children, learn to honour your country, virtue, fidelity, and humanity.'
"And she, whose youth, beauty, and innocence they prostitute—her pure and chaste heart trembles under the touch of a polluted hand? Estimable and unhappy woman!...
"Soon the cordons of honour and the pomp of wealth will vanish, and the contempt of mankind will be heaped on you. Will you seek, on the breast of him who is the author of that report, a consolation with which your gentle and loving soul cannot dispense? Will you seek in his eyes tears to mingle with your own? Will your trembling hand, laid upon his heart, try to tell him the emotion of yours? Ah! if you find tears with him, they will be tears of remorse. If his heart beats, it will be in the convulsions of the wretch who dies cursing nature, himself, and the hand that leads him.
"O Lameth! O Robespierre! O Petion! O Volney! O Mirabeau! O Barnave! O Bailley! O Lafayette! see, this is the man that dares to sit by your side! Quite drenched in the blood of his brothers, polluted with crimes of every kind, he presents himself shamelessly in his General's uniform, the unrighteous hire of his villanies! He dares to call himself a representative of the nation, he—who has sold it, and you suffer it! He dares to raise his eyes to listen to your discourses, and you suffer it! This the voice of the people!—he had but the votes of twelve aristocrats! This the voice of the people!—and Ajaccio, Bastia, and most of the cantons wreaked that upon his effigy which they would willingly have done upon his person.
"But you, whom the mistake of the moment misleads, whose belief is for the present abused to make you oppose the projected alterations, will you endure the traitor? him who, under the cold exterior of a sensible man, conceals the greed of a lackey? I cannot believe it. You will be the first to drive him forth in shame and disgrace, as soon as you have been made to comprehend that web of knaveries of which he has been the artist.
"I have the honour, Monsieur, to be your very humble, and very obedient servant,
Bonaparte."
"From my Cabinet of Milelli,
"Jan. 23, in the second year."
"From my Cabinet of Milelli"—it sounds quite imperially. The reader will probably find that this bold, unsparing, powerful letter of the youth of twenty-one, half-Robespierre, half-Murat, is in no respect inferior to the best specimens of revolutionary eloquence furnished by the pamphlets of the period.
I may observe here, that of the six Corsican deputies to the Convention, three voted for the perpetual confinement of Louis Capet, two for his confinement till peace was established and his banishment thereafter, Cristoforo Saliceti alone for his death.
CHAPTER VI.
NAPOLEON'S LATEST ACTIVITY IN CORSICA.
In the year 1790, two battalions were to be formed in Corsica, the soldiers being allowed to name their chefs themselves. It is worth noticing on this occasion, how the subsequent Cæsar, Napoleon, holds it for the highest honour, and an almost unattainable piece of good fortune, to become chef of a battalion. The difficulties were as great as the energy of the young candidate. The most influential men of Ajaccio were opposed to him, Cuneo, Ludovico Ornano, Ugo Peretti, Matias Pozzo di Borgo, and the rich Marius Peraldi. Peraldi laughed at Napoleon, ridiculed his personal appearance, his diminutive stature, his limited prospects. This made Napoleon furious, and he challenged him. Peraldi agreed to a duel. His rival waited for him till nightfall at the little Chapel of the Greeks, walking restlessly up and down; but Peraldi did not make his appearance; his family had found means to prevent the duel.
The wanderer who now takes his way to the Chapel of the Greeks, to enjoy from it the beautiful view of the city and gulf, sees above him, on the rocks of the shore, a little Ionic temple. I asked what it meant, and was told it was the tomb of the Peraldi. Marius, the rival of Napoleon for a Major's commission, lies buried there. His family has left behind it no other reputation than that of having been one of the wealthiest in Corsica.
Madame Letitia sacrificed half her fortune to procure her favourite son the command of the battalion. Her house was constantly open to Napoleon's numerous party, her table always covered. Mattresses lay constantly ready in the rooms and in the passages, to receive his armed adherents during the night. It was as if the house were in a state of defence from the Vendetta. Matters looked threatening. Napoleon was never so excited as at this period; he could not sleep at night, during the day he wandered restlessly through the rooms, or deliberated with the Abbé Fesch and his partisans. He was pale and abstracted; his eyes full of fire, his soul full of passion. Perhaps he approached the consulship and the empire more calmly than the rank of major in the National Guard of Ajaccio.
The commissary, who was to conduct the election, had arrived, and was lodging in the house of the Peraldi. This was alarming. It was resolved, therefore, on the 18th Brumaire, to have recourse to stratagem. The partisans of Napoleon arm themselves; one of these—the fierce and reckless Bagaglino, armed to the teeth—forces his way at night into the house of the Peraldi, where the family are sitting at supper with the commissary. "Madame Letitia wishes to speak with you," cries Bagaglino threateningly; "and immediately!" The commissary follows him, the Peraldi not venturing to detain their guest; who, carried off by the Napoleonists, is compelled to quarter himself in the Casa Bonaparte, under the pretext that with the Peraldi he was not free. This little coup d'état shows us Napoleon complete.
The Casa Bonaparte now held itself ready for an assault; but Peraldi made no attempt. The day of the election came, and the people assembled in the Church of San Francesco. A disturbance arose, Geronimo Pozzo di Borgo was torn from the pulpit, and with difficulty rescued. The result of the election was this: Quenza, a Bonapartist, was made first chef—Napoleon, the second. The victory was almost complete, and the unattainable all but attained; Napoleon was second in command of a battalion.
Napoleon lived henceforth only among his soldiers, and he was the soul of his battalion. He now made his practical military studies before engaging in actual warfare, as he had received his political schooling in the clubs. Meanwhile, the irritation between the national battalion and the aristocrats and citizens—the latter worked upon by the priests—grew stronger every day. After seeing the highland Corsicans of the present time, one can form some idea of the nature and appearance of that Quenza-Napoleon battalion. The citizens of Ajaccio may not have dreaded this troop of Montagnards in the process of training altogether groundlessly. On Easter-day, of the year 1792, open hostilities commenced between the battalion and the inhabitants of Ajaccio. The struggle began on the Place du Diamant; the fighting lasted several days, and a great deal of blood was shed, neither the civil authorities nor the military commandant, Maillard, interfering. Napoleon escaped without injury. When quiet was re-established, he drew up a justification, in the name of the battalion, and addressed it to the Department, to the Minister of War, and the Legislative. Three commissaries hereupon appeared in Ajaccio; they returned a favourable report as to the conduct of the battalion, but it was removed from the town. Napoleon went to Corte, where Paoli received him coldly.
In May of the same year, he made a journey to Paris to bring his sister Eliza from St. Cyr. The changes in the political world took him here by surprise, and shattered all the hopes of military promotion which he had thought to realize in Paris. This is said to have produced so powerful an effect on the passionate nature of the young Corsican, as to make him entertain thoughts of suicide. He freed himself from them in a dialogue on self-murder. Napoleon left Paris soon after the frightful 2d of September, and returned to Corsica.
While Dumouriez, therefore, was astonishing the world with the first military achievements of the young Republic, the man who was destined to give new shape to Europe, was exerting himself in the wild Corsica, to make head against the cabals of his opponents—himself forming counter-cabals, and daily exposing his life to the dagger-thrust and the musket-ball. Arrived again in Corte, Paoli received him austerely. The paths of the two had completely separated; for another ambition was now stirring in the soul of the young Napoleon than to tread in the footsteps of the noble patriot. Had he done so—had his heart remained warm for the freedom of Corsica, then perhaps a wild goat-herd, as he pointed out to me some spot among the hills associated with a tale of blood, would have said: "See, it was here the Corsican patriot-leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, fell; he was almost as great as Sampiero."
Paoli gave Napoleon orders to proceed to Bonifazio, and join the expedition against Sardinia. Napoleon obeyed murmuringly. He remained eight months in Bonifazio, to make the necessary preparations, as far as they had been committed to him. On the 22d of January, the day after the execution of Louis Capet, Napoleon almost lost his life in Bonifazio. Some marines—a furious rabble from Marseilles—had landed, and commenced a quarrel with the Corsican battalion; and when Napoleon hastened up to prevent bloodshed, they received him with shouts of ça ira! cried out that he was an aristocrat, and, rushing in upon him, would have hung him on the lamp-post, had not the Maire, the people, and the soldiers succeeded in putting them to flight.
The enterprise upon Sardinia, of which Truguet was commander-in-chief, undertaken with a view to frighten the court of Turin, proved utterly futile. It is affirmed that Paoli had a share in its ill success. It is true that he had sent a thousand of his National Guards, under the command of his most trusted friend, Colonna Cesari; but, as the latter himself afterwards admitted, he had said to him: "Remember, O Cesari! that Sardinia is the natural ally of our island; that it has, under all circumstances, supplied us with victuals and ammunition, and that the King of Piedmont has ever been the friend of the Corsicans and their cause." The squadron, under the command of Colonna, at length left the harbour of Bonifazio, and made sail for the island of Santa Maddalena. Napoleon was next in command under Colonna, and was intrusted with the artillery. The young officer burned with impatience; it was his first deed of arms. He was one of the foremost to jump ashore, and he threw, with his own hand, a fireball into the little town of Maddalena. But the admirable measures he had taken proved completely fruitless; the Sardinians made a sortie; Colonna immediately ordered the retreat to be sounded.
The young Napoleon wept for rage; he made the most vehement representations to Colonna, and when the latter listened to him with cool indifference, Napoleon turned to some officers, and said, "He does not understand me." "You are an impudent fellow!" thundered Colonna to him. The born soldier knew his duty, was silent, and placed himself at his post. "He is a parade-horse, and nothing more," said he afterwards. Napoleon's first expedition was thus unfortunate, discreditable—a retreat.
On his return to Bonifazio, he learned that Paoli, who now saw himself compelled to throw off the mask, had dissolved the Quenza battalion. This occurred in the spring of 1793, about the time that the Convention sent Saliceti, Delcher, and Lacombe, to the island as commissaries. Lucian Bonaparte and Bartolommeo Arena had denounced Paoli. But Napoleon had no part in this denunciation; the memory of his father, and his own generous spirit, led him, on the contrary, to defend his great countryman. He himself wrote an apology for Paoli, and sent it to the Convention—an action that does him honour. This remarkable document has been preserved, though in a somewhat defective state. We have the defence, it appears to me, as Napoleon first threw it off, previously to giving it a complete form.
NAPOLEON'S LETTER TO THE CONVENTION.
"Representatives!—You are the true organs of the people's sovereignty. All your decrees are dictated by the nation, or receive their effect immediately from the nation. Every one of your laws is a benefit, and earns for you a new claim on the gratitude of posterity, which owes to you the Republic, and on that of the world, which will date from you its freedom.
"A single decree that you have passed has greatly disheartened the city of Ajaccio; that which commands a feeble gray-haired man of seventy to drag himself to your bar, and place himself for a moment beside the impious mover of sedition or the venal self-seeker.
"Paoli a mover of sedition, or an ambitious man?
"Seditious! and with what object? To revenge himself on the family of the Bourbons, whose perfidious policy overwhelmed his country with calamity, and forced himself into banishment. But was not the end of their tyranny also the end of his exile; and have you not already appeased his wrath—if he still cherished it—by the blood of Louis?
"Seditious! and with what object? To restore the aristocracy of the nobles and the priests? He who, since his thirteenth year ... he who was no sooner at the head of affairs than he destroyed feudalism, and knew no other distinction than that of the citizen; he who, thirty years ago, fought against Rome, and was excommunicated,[M] who made himself master of the estates of the bishops to give them away, to Venice ... in Italy....
"Seditious! and with what object? To deliver Corsica into the hands of England? he who would not deliver it to France, despite the efforts of Chauvelin, who did not spare titles nor marks of favour!
"Give Corsica to England! What would he gain by living in the mire of London? Why did he not remain there when he was banished?
"Paoli a self-seeker! If Paoli is a self-seeker, what more can he desire? He is the object of his people's affection, and they refuse him nothing; he is at the head of the army; he is on the eve of the day when he must defend the island against a foreign attack.
"If Paoli was ambitious, then he has gained everything by the Republic; and if he has showed himself an adherent of ... since the Constituent Assembly, what should he do now, when the people is everything?
"Paoli ambitious! Representatives! when the French were governed by a corrupt court, when men believed neither in virtue nor in love of country, then certainly it might have been said that Paoli was ambitious. We made war against the tyrants; it is to be supposed that that was not from love of country and of liberty, but from the ambition of our leaders! In Coblenz, Paoli must be considered as ambitious; but in Paris—the centre of French freedom—Paoli, if people know him well, must be accounted the patriarch of the French Republic; posterity will think thus—the people think thus. Follow my advice, silence calumny, and the utterly corrupt men who use it as their instrument. Representatives! Paoli is more than a grayhaired man of threescore and ten—he is infirm. Otherwise he would have gone to your bar to crush his enemies. We owe him everything—even the happiness of being a French Republic. He enjoys our constant trust. Revoke, as concerns him, your decree of the 2d of April, and restore joy to this whole people."...
Soon after this, however, the young revolutionist completely quarrelled with Paoli; they became deadly enemies. The aged patriot found in the young man the most violent adversary, not of his person, but of his ideas. It is said that Paoli did not quite know him at that time, and had hinted to him that it was his intention to separate Corsica from France, and effect a connexion with England, that the indignant Napoleon did not conceal his anger, and that Paoli hereupon flew into a furious passion, and conceived the most violent hatred for his opponent. Pasquale's adherents were numerous, and the fortress of Ajaccio was in the hands of his friend Colonna. Paoli and Pozzo di Borgo, then procurator-general, cited before the Convention, defied the summons, and lived now under the ban of the Convention, and at open war with France.
The three representatives now made Napoleon Inspector-general of Corsican Artillery, and instructed him to reduce the citadel of Ajaccio. He attempted it, but all his exertions to conquer the fortress of his native town were in vain. Destiny had planted no laurels for Napoleon in Corsica. During the siege, his life was on one occasion in extreme danger. He had occupied the Tower of Capitello with about fifty men, in order to operate from that point by land, while the vessels of war carried on the bombardment from the sea. A storm blew the fleet out of the gulf, and Napoleon remained cut off from it in the tower, where he had to defend himself for three days, living on horse-flesh, till some herdsmen from the mountains freed him from his perilous situation, and he succeeded in reaching the fleet.
Much disconcerted, he was proceeding to Bastia by land. On the way, however, he learned that his life was threatened, that Marius Peraldi had instigated the people to seize him, and put him into the hands of Paoli, who meant to shoot him as soon as he had him in his power. In Vivario he was concealed by the parish priest; in Bocognano his friends rescued him with the greatest difficulty from the fury of the people; during the night, he escaped through the window from the chamber in which he had hid himself, and at length reached Ajaccio in safety. Here again, however, menaced still more seriously, he fled from his house to a grotto near the Chapel of the Greeks, where he remained concealed for a night. His friends now conveyed him safely on board a vessel, and he reached Bastia by sea. The fury of the Paolists was meanwhile directed upon Napoleon's family. Madame Letitia, terrified at the symptoms of approaching danger, fled with her children to Milelli, accompanied by some trusty peasants of Bastelica and Bocognano. Louis, Eliza, Paulina, and the Abbé Fesch were with her; Jerome and Caroline remained in concealment with the Ramolinos. Still insecure in Milelli, the persecuted family fled during the night to the shore in the vicinity of the Tower of Capitello, to await there the arrival of the French fleet, which had been announced as on its way to reduce the citadel of Ajaccio. The flight through the rugged hill-country was difficult and fatiguing; for there are no paths in that region but over the rocks, through the macchia, and over the mountain-torrents. Madame Letitia held little Paulina by the hand, Fesch preceded with Eliza and Louis; a troop of adherents from Bastelica, the birthplace of Sampiero, marched in advance, and behind them the men of Bocognano, armed with daggers, muskets, and pistols. The family of Napoleon wandering thus through the mountains, reached at length, after great exertions—clambering over rocks, and wading through streams—the shore at Capitello, where they all concealed themselves in the woods.
About this time Napoleon had thrown himself on board a small vessel in Bastia, had out-sailed the French fleet, and landed at Isola Rossa, where many of the herdsmen of his family have their pasturing-grounds. Here learning that his relatives were in flight, he sent shepherds out in all directions to seek for them, and passed the night waiting in the most painful suspense for news. Morning dawned; he was sitting under a rock, anxiously pondering the fate of his friends. Suddenly a herdsman rushed up to him, crying, "Save yourself!" A band of men from Ajaccio, in quest of Bonaparte and his family, was hastening towards him. Napoleon sprang into the sea. His little vessel, a chebeque, kept his pursuers off by its fire, and the boat it had immediately lowered took him safely on board.
On the same day Bonaparte sailed into the gulf, and keeping close in shore, he saw people making signals to be taken off. These were his mother Letitia and her children.
The suffering family was conveyed with all speed to Calvi, where hospitable entertainers were found. But the house of the Bonapartes, in Ajaccio, had been entered and plundered by the furious mob. The family owed its rescue entirely to the prudence and foresight of the Corsican Costa, to whom Napoleon in his will bequeathed the sum of 100,000 francs in acknowledgment of the service.
The young Bonaparte himself, called away from a fruitless attempt upon Ajaccio, in which he was not supported by the fleet, also sailed to Calvi; and leaving Corsica from this point, he appears again at Toulon.
Pasquale Paoli himself had thus driven him out into European history. Two men, bitter enemies of each other—Marbœuf and Paoli—that is, despotism and democracy, had guided Napoleon to his special career. When Napoleon became consul, and his star shone the Cynosure of the world, the star of Paoli had long since set. Deeply does it move me when I think of the noble old Pasquale living in forgotten and solitary exile in London, and illuminating his house in unselfish joy, when he hears of the dignity to which his countryman has attained, forgetting his grudge, and hoping that the great Corsican may become a blessing to humanity. In one of his letters, he says: "Napoleon has consummated our Vendetta on all those that were the authors of our fall. I only wish he may remember his country." He remained in banishment; Napoleon did not recall him, perhaps because he feared to excite the jealousy of the French.
In the days of his prosperity, Bonaparte forgot his little fatherland; thankless and weak, like all parvenus, who are unwilling to be reminded of the obscure spot that gave them birth. He did nothing for the poor island, and the Corsicans have not been able to forget this. They still remember that the Emperor, when a Corsican once presented himself to him, drily asked him: "Well, how is it in Corsica; are the Corsicans always murdering each other yet?"
He visited his native island only once after that flight from Calvi—on his return from Egypt. On the 29th of September 1799, his ship ran into the harbour of Ajaccio; with him were Murat, who was yet to leave this same harbour under very changed circumstances—Eugene, Berthier, Lannes, Andreosi, Louis Bonaparte, Morge, and Berthollet. He sat there on board, and read the journals during the night and great part of the next day. He was unwilling to land; but his officers were curious to become acquainted with his birthplace, and he at length yielded to their solicitations, and those of the citizens of Ajaccio. A man, who had in his boyhood been one of the spectators of this landing, gave me an account of it. "Look you," said he, "this Place du Diamant was covered with a huzzaing crowd, and the people filled the roofs; they wanted to see the wonderful man, who, a few years before, had walked about these streets a simple officer, and one of the leading democrats of Ajaccio. He alighted at the Casa Bonaparte, and came out afterwards and walked in the Place du Diamant. But I must tell you of a circumstance that does him honour. When Napoleon lived in Ajaccio, the priests and aristocrats were his bitter enemies. He was one day returning to his house, and had arrived just at the corner of this street, when he saw a priest, a relation of my own, standing at the window of yonder house, and levelling a musket at him. Napoleon bent himself that moment, and the ball whizzed over his head into the wall behind;—a moment sooner, and the world would never have seen an Emperor Napoleon. Well, General Bonaparte met that priest on the Place du Diamant. The man, well remembering that he had once shot at him, turned off to one side. But Napoleon saw him, stepped up to him, gave him his hand, and reminded him good-humouredly of old times. Look you, he was no Corsican in that; great men readily forget injuries." Napoleon, however, was a thorough Corsican when he had the Duke of Enghien shot. This deed was the deed of a Corsican bandit, and can only be rightly understood when we know what the custom of the Vendetta in Corsica allows—the murder even of innocent members of an enemy's family. Napoleon could not quite disown his Corsican temperament; and thus we find him romantic, theatrical, adventurous, as the Corsicans in a certain degree are. Egypt, Russia, Elba, are passages in his history in which he was nothing but a great and genial adventurer.
He went out shooting on occasion of that visit to Ajaccio, and spent a day in Milelli, where he wrote the pamphlet against Buttafucco. How many wonderful deeds lay already behind him! how many princes and peoples had the might of his sword and the thunder of his phrases already overthrown! He called his herdsmen about him, and richly rewarded that Bagaglino who had aided him in carrying out his first coup d'état. He distributed his herds and his lands. His nurse, too, Camilla Ilari, came to see him: she embraced him weeping; and as she presented him with a flask of milk she had brought, said in her naïve and simple way: "My son, I gave you the milk of my heart—take now the milk of my goat." Napoleon gave her a comfortable house in Ajaccio, and a large extent of arable land; and when he became Emperor, he added a pension of 3600 francs. After remaining six days in Corsica, he again sailed from Ajaccio for France.
He never afterwards visited his native island; but fate one day gave him a sight of it, when, a defeated man, whom history had laid aside as no longer available for its aims, he stood upon the narrow cliff of Elba. Then ironic destiny showed him the obscure corner from which, as a child of fortune, he had issued into the world to seek a career.
Later, on St. Helena, his thoughts constantly recurred to Corsica. People on their deathbeds usually wander back in imagination through the course of their lives, and dwell with greatest pleasure on their childhood. He spoke a great deal of his native island. In the Commentaries, he says on one occasion: "My good Corsicans were not contented with me in the time of the Consulate and the Empire. They affirmed I had done little for my country.... Those who hated me, and still more those who envied me, were continually on the watch; all that I did for my Corsicans was cried down as a theft and an injustice to the French. This necessary policy had turned away the hearts of my countrymen from me, and made them cold towards me. I pity them, but I could not act otherwise. When the Corsicans saw me unfortunate, abused by many an ungrateful Frenchman—when they saw all Europe in conspiracy against me, they forgot all, like men of steadfast and incorruptible virtue, and were ready to sacrifice themselves for me if I had wished.... What memories Corsica has left me! I think with joy still on its fair regions, on its mountains; I remember still the fragrance that it exhales. I should have bettered the lot of my beautiful Corsica, I should have made my fellow-countrymen happy; but days of misfortune came, and I have not been able to carry out my plans."
The first question that Napoleon put to the Corsican Antommarchi, his physician, when he entered his room in St. Helena, was: "Have you a Filippini?" Many of his countrymen had been his companions throughout his career; he had raised many to elevated stations—Bacciocchi, Arena, Cervioni, Arrighi, Saliceti, Casabianca, Abbatucci, Sebastiani. His relation to that Colonna who had been the friend of Paoli, and who had once been hostile to him, was to the last one of intimate friendship. It is said that Paoli had commissioned Colonna to lay an ambuscade for Napoleon near Ajaccio, and take him alive or dead; such, at least, is the report. Colonna refused. He remained the friend of both, of Napoleon as well as Paoli—and that without playing the hypocrite, for he was a high-spirited man. He was the first who knew of Napoleon's flight from Elba; and in the will which he made in St. Helena, the Emperor intrusted to him the charge of his mother. Colonna discharged this trust conscientiously, and till Letitia's death remained with her as her friend and manager of her affairs. He then retired to Vico, near Ajaccio.
The dying Napoleon received extreme unction from the hands of a Corsican, the priest Vignale, who was afterwards murdered in his native island. He died thus among brother Corsicans, who had not forsaken him.
CHAPTER VII.
TWO COFFINS.
"Where are the princes who held mightiest sway?
Where are the heroes all, the wise and bold?
The world endures when thou hast pass'd away,
And none has read its riddle deep and old.
The course of things is full of teachings wise,
But, reckless still, we close unheeding eyes."—Firdusi.
As I called up before my mind the history of Napoleon, his splendid empire, the peoples and princes that this headlong comet had drawn onward in his train, the flood of events he had thrown upon the world, the influence he had exercised over unnumbered human destinies—there came over me, in his now desolate and silent house, at once a sadness and its consolation.
All those boundless passions that devoured half the world and were not satisfied, where are they, and what power have they now? They are as a dream, as a great fable that Father Time tells his children. Our thanks are due to Time—the silent and mysterious power that again levels all, humbles heaven-aspiring potentates, checks unscrupulous self-aggrandizement, and effectually ostracizes over-grown ambition.
Where is Napoleon? What is left of him?
A name and a relic, which an easily blinded nation now publicly worships. What lately happened beyond the Rhine, appears to me like the celebration of Napoleon's suppressed funeral of 1821.[N] But the dead do not rise again. After the gods have come their ghosts; and after the hero-tragedy, the satyr-farce. The breath of a charnel-house has spread through the world from beyond the Rhine, since they wakened a dead man there.
I went from the house of Letitia to the church where her coffin stands.
The street of the King of Rome leads to the Cathedral of Ajaccio. This church is a heavy building, with a plain facade; above its portal are some defaced armorial bearings. They are, doubtless, those of the extinct Republic of Genoa. The interior of the cathedral has a motley and rustic appearance. Heavy pillars divide it into three naves (drei Schiffe); the dome is small, like the gallery.
Near the choir, to the right, a little chapel, hung with black, has been put up. Two coffins, covered with black velvet, stand therein, before an altar, coarsely decorated in the style we find in village churches. Clumsy wooden candlesticks have been placed at the head and foot of each coffin; and above each hangs a perpetual, but extinguished lamp. On the coffin to the left lies a cardinal's hat and an amaranth-wreath; on the coffin to the right an imperial crown and an amaranth-wreath.
They are the coffins of Cardinal Fesch and Madame Letitia. They were brought hither from their Italian tombs in the year 1851. Letitia died in her Roman palace, in the Place di Venezia, on the 2d of February 1836, and her coffin had since stood in a church of the little town of Corneto, near Rome.
No marble, no sculpture, nothing of the pomp of death, adorns the spot where a woman lies who gave birth to an emperor, three kings, and three princesses.
I was astonished at the unconscious irony, the deep tragic meaning that lay, as it seemed to me, in the almost rustic simplicity of Letitia's tomb. It was like a princely tomb in the scenes of a theatre. Her coffin rests on a high wooden platform; the clumsy candlesticks are of wood, the gold is tinsel. The canopy of the chapel would fain look like velvet, but it is of common taffeta, and the long silver fringes are only silver paper. The golden imperial diadem on the coffin is of gilded wood. The amaranthine wreath of Letitia alone is genuine.
I was told that this chapel was merely temporary, and that a new cathedral was to be built, with a beautiful tomb for Letitia. Improbable enough; the Corsicans are very poor, and for my part, I should be sorry to see it. The worthy citizens of Ajaccio do not know how wise they have been. A profound philosophy speaks from this chapel—what sort of crowns were those that Letitia of Ajaccio and her children wore? For one short evening they were princes, then they hurriedly threw away sceptre and purple, and vanished. History itself, therefore, has laid the tinselled crown on the coffin of the daughter of the citizen Ramolino. Let it lie—it is not the less beautiful that it is counterfeit, like the lofty fortunes of the bastard kings that this woman bore.
Never, so long as the world has stood, has a mother's heart beat higher than the heart of the woman in this coffin. She saw her children, one after another, stand at the loftiest zenith of human glory; and, one after another, saw the same children fall. She has paid Destiny its debt.
Truly, it is hard for him who stands by this coffin to restrain his emotion, so sad, so moving is the great tragedy of a mother's heart that lies therein enclosed. What an undeserved fate!—and how came it that, in the bosom of this gay, young, unpretending woman, those world-convulsing forces and those men and city-devouring passions were to ripen?
CHAPTER VIII.
POZZO DI BORGO.
The house in the street Napoleon, in which the fugitive Murat lived, has been rebuilt in a style of great magnificence. The arms of the Pozzo di Borgo family, above the door, inform us to whom it belongs. After the Bonapartes, these Pozzi di Borgo are the most famous family in Ajaccio; they are of an old and noble stock, and their name began to be of note long before that of the Bonapartes. In the sixteenth century they distinguished themselves in the service of the Venetians. The Corsican poet, Biagino di Leca, who, in his epic called Il d'Ornano Marte, celebrates the achievements of Alfonso Ornano, praises also several of the Pozzi di Borgo, and predicts to their race undying fame.
The family has certainly attained a European importance, in the person of Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, the friend of Paoli, and in his youth the friend of the young Napoleon; but later, the unrelenting, the truly Corsican foe of the Emperor. He was born in Alata, a village near Ajaccio, on the 8th of March 1768; he studied law in Pisa together with Carlo Bonaparte, and afterwards made himself conspicuous in Corsica, first as revolutionary democrat, then as Paolist. In the year 1791 he was representative for Ajaccio, then Procurator-general and Paoli's right hand. When Corsica allied herself with England, this clever politician was chosen president of the Council of State, under the viceroyship of Elliot. People say that he brought his patron, Paoli, into bad odour with the English, in order to make his own influence supreme. He afterwards left Corsica, made several journeys to London, travelled to Vienna, to Russia, to Constantinople, to Syria; wandering from country to country and court to court, this unwearied foe kept stirring up with ceaseless activity the hatred of the cabinets against Napoleon. Alexander had made him a member of the Russian Privy Council in 1802. Napoleon, in his turn, pursued him with a hatred equally bitter; he longed to have this man within his power—this artful and dreaded antagonist that crossed him at every turn. At the peace of Presburg he demanded that he should be delivered into his hands. Had he obtained this demand, he would have done with Pozzo di Borgo what Charles XII. did with Patkul. Remarkable is this enmity—it is true Corsican Vendetta—Corsican hatred playing a part in universal history. It was Pozzo di Borgo who induced Bernadotte to become the active opponent of Napoleon; it was he who impelled the allies to a speedy march on Paris; it was he who set the King of Rome aside; he who, at the Congress of Vienna, insisted that Napoleon should be banished from the dangerous Elba to a distant island. At Waterloo he fought with armed hand against his great adversary, and received a wound. And when at length his gigantic but now for ever vanquished foe lay dead in St. Helena, he uttered those haughty and terrible words: "I have not killed Napoleon; but I have thrown the last shovelful of earth upon him!"
Pozzo di Borgo earned a Russian coronet, and the honour of remaining the perpetual representative of all Russian states at the court of France. Living in Paris, he became a frank opponent of the reaction, and thereby endangered his relation to the courts. Notwithstanding his career, he was, and remained, a Corsican. I have been told that he never laid aside his Corsican habits of life: he loved his country. It was, one may say, another victory of his over Napoleon, that he took from him the gratitude of his countrymen. Napoleon did nothing for Corsica, Pozzo di Borgo much. He had the works of the two Corsican historians, Filippini and Peter Cyrnæus, published at his own expense, and Gregori dedicated to him a collection of the statutes. Pozzo di Borgo's name is now inseparably connected with the three greatest documents of Corsican history, and is imperishable. He freely spent his large means on charitable foundations, and in general beneficence towards his countrymen. He died a private individual at Paris, on the 15th of January 1842, at the age of seventy-four, at variance with the world about him, sick and sad at heart, and weary of life. He was one of the most skilful diplomatists and clearest heads of the present century.
His immense fortune passed to his nephews, who have bought rich estates in the neighbourhood of Ajaccio. A few years ago, one of them was murdered close to the town. He had the management of the funds devoted by Count Carlo Andrea to benevolent purposes, and had drawn odium upon himself by acts of injustice. I was told, besides, that he had seduced a girl; and that, as he refused to pay a certain large sum demanded in reparation by her kinsfolk, they resolved upon his death. One day when he was driving from his villa to the town, these men stopped and surrounded the carriage, and called to him: "Come out, nephew of Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo!" The unhappy man obeyed instantly. The murderers then coolly completed this summary execution, in broad daylight, and on the open highway, as if it were an act of popular justice against a criminal. Their shots, however, had not quite killed the man. The murderers placed him in his carriage, and bade the coachman drive homewards, that the nephew of Pozzo di Borgo might die in his bed. They then took to the woods, where they met with their death some time after, in a fight with the gendarmes.
Such is one shocking instance of the rude popular justice still so prevalent in Corsica. I shall here relate another. The circumstances excite our astonishment and admiration, but are at the same time exceedingly painful. The scene is Alata, the native village of the Pozzo di Borgo family, a few miles from Ajaccio.
A CORSICAN BRUTUS.
Two grenadiers belonging to a French regiment, forming, as Genoese auxiliaries, the garrison of Ajaccio, one day deserted. They fled to the hills of Alata, and kept themselves concealed there in the wild fastnesses, subsisting on the hospitality of the poor but kind-hearted shepherds.
Sacred are the laws of hospitality; he who breaks them is before God and man like Cain.
When the next spring came, it chanced that some officers from the garrison went a-hunting to the hills of Alata. They came near the place where the two fugitives lived in concealment. These latter caught sight of the huntsmen, and cowered behind a rock, lest they should be recognised and perhaps shot down as game. Quite near them a young herdsman was watching his goats. The colonel of the regiment, De Rozières, stepped up to him and inquired if any deserters were concealed in the mountains thereabouts. The herdsman said that he did not know, and was embarrassed. De Rozières began to have suspicions. He threatened the youth with severe punishment—with immediate imprisonment in the Tower of Ajaccio, if he did not tell the truth.
Joseph was frightened; he said nothing, but he pointed to the spot where the poor grenadiers lay hiding. The officer did not understand him. "Speak!" he shouted. Joseph said nothing, but pointed again. The other officers, who had laid hold of the young man, now left him, and hastened in the direction where he had pointed, expecting possibly to find some animal which this stupid mute knew to be lying there.
The two deserters started up and took to flight, but were overtaken and made fast.
Colonel de Rozières gave Joseph four bright louis-d'ors as informer's reward. When the young herdsman saw the gold pieces in his own hand, he forgot, in his childish joy, officers and grenadiers and the whole world; for he had never seen the like before. He ran into his father's hut—called father, mother, and brothers together, and behaved like one out of his wits as he showed them his treasure.
"How didst thou earn this gold, my son Joseph?" asked the old shepherd. The son narrated what had happened. With every word he uttered, his father's countenance grew darker; the brothers seemed horror-struck, and, by the time his story was told, Joseph had grown pale as death.
Sacred are the laws of hospitality; he who breaks them is before God and man like Cain.
The old shepherd threw one terrible glance on his trembling son, and left the hut. He called all his kinsfolk together. When they were assembled, he related to them the circumstances, and requested them to pronounce judgment on his son; for it appeared to him that he was a traitor, and had brought shame on his own house, and all the neighbourhood.
This court of kinsmen pronounced the deed worthy of death, and there was not a dissenting voice. "Wo to me and to my son!" cried the old man in despair. "Wo to my wife that bare me the Judas!"
The kinsmen went to Joseph. They took him and led him to the city-wall of Ajaccio, to a lonely place.
"Wait here," said the old shepherd; "I will go to the commandant, and beg of him the lives of the two grenadiers. Let their lives be my son's life."
The old man went to Colonel de Rozières. On his knees he implored of him the pardon of the two soldiers. The officer gazed on him in astonishment, and could not understand why this compassionate shepherd should weep so bitterly for two foreign soldiers. But he said to him that the punishment of the deserter was death; so the law willed it. The old man rose, and went out groaning.
He returned to the wall, where his friends stood with the unhappy Joseph. "It was in vain," he said, "my son Joseph, thou must die; die like a brave man; and farewell!"
Poor Joseph wept, but he was quiet and composed. A priest had been brought, who confessed him, and endeavoured to comfort the unhappy youth.
It was just the hour when they were scourging the two deserters to death with rods. Joseph placed himself quietly by the wall. The kinsmen took certain aim—and Joseph was dead!
When he had fallen, his old father, bitterly weeping, took the four louis-d'ors, gave them to the priest, and said: "Go to the commandant, and say: "Sir, here you have the Judas-money back. We are poor and honest people, and have executed justice on him who took them from your hand. The laws of hospitality are sacred, and he who breaks them is before God and man as Cain.'"
In Alata and Ajaccio, the noble action of a woman of the Pozzo di Borgo family is still well remembered.
MARIANNA POZZO DI BORGO.
In Appietto, near Ajaccio, the people were merrily celebrating the Carnival. According to an ancient custom, still observed in the island, the Carnival-king sat on a throne in the middle of the market-place, a golden crown on his head, and surrounded by his Ministers of State. Tables had been placed there, covered with fruits, wine, and provisions of every sort. For the Carnival-king had vigorously imposed his taxes; it is Corsican Carnival-law that he has the right to tax the families of the village, each according to its means; and this tribute they must pay in wine and viands for the common entertainment.
It was a merry feast, and the wine was not spared. Guitar and violin were not idle, and the young folks were wheeling in the dance.
Suddenly, in the midst of the merriment, was heard a shot and a cry, and the revellers scattered in every direction. A wild tumult arose in the market-place of Appietto. The young Felix Pozzo di Borgo was lying in his blood. Andrea Romanetti had shot him dead—some insulting words had been dropped. Andrea had taken to the macchia.
They bore the dead youth into the house of his mother. The women raised their wail; the guitars were silent.—Felix's mother, Marianna, was a widow; she had seen much trouble. As soon as the youth was buried, she dried her tears, and thought only of avenging him, for she was a woman of a high spirit, and sprung of the ancient house of Colonna d'Istria.
Marianna laid aside her female dress, and put on male attire. She wrapped herself in the pelone, put a Phrygian cap upon her head, girded herself with the carchera, placed dagger and pistols in her belt, and grasped the double-barrel. In all respects she was like a rough Corsican man; but her scarlet girdle, the velvet border of her pelone, and the ornamented hilt of her dagger, which shone with ivory and mother-of-pearl, showed that she belonged to a noble house.
She put herself at the head of her relations, and unrestingly pursued the murderer of her son. Andrea Romanetti flew from bush to bush, from grotto to grotto, and from hill to hill. But Marianna kept close upon his track. In the darkness of night, the fugitive threw himself into his own house in the village of Marchesacchia. Here a girl connected with the family of his enemies detected him, and gave information. Marianna was immediately on the spot. Her relations surrounded the house. Romanetti made a brave defence, but when his powder was exhausted, and his enemies had got upon the roof, and from that side were forcing an entrance, he saw that he was a lost man. He now thought of nothing but the welfare of his soul; for he was pious and God-fearing.
"Stop!" cried Romanetti from the house, "I will surrender; but promise me first, that before I die, I shall have a confessor." Marianna Pozzo di Borgo promised him this.
Romanetti then came out, and gave himself into the hands of his foes. They brought him to the village of Toppa, and there they led him before the house of the parish priest, Saverius Casalonga. Marianna called the priest out, and prayed him to receive the confession of Romanetti, for that after it he must die.
The priest begged the unhappy man's life with tears; but his prayers were fruitless. He then received his confession, and while this proceeded, Marianna lay upon her knees and besought God that He would have mercy on the murderer of her son.
The confession was ended. The Pozzi di Borgo led Romanetti outside the village, and bound him to a tree.
They raised their pieces; suddenly Marianna rushed before them. "Stop!" she cried, "for God's sake, stop!" and she ran to the tree where Romanetti stood bound, and flung her arms round the murderer of her son. "In the name of God," she cried, "I forgive him. Yes, he has made me the most unhappy of mothers, but ye shall do him no further harm, and shoot me rather than him." And she continued to hold her enemy in her embrace, and to protect him with her own body.
The priest came forward; but his words were not needed. The men loosed Romanetti, and from that moment he was free, and his life sacred for the Pozzi di Borgo, so that none ever touched a hair of his head.
CHAPTER IX.
ENVIRONS OF AJACCIO.
I spent some time in wandering through the country round Ajaccio. The uneven nature of the ground allows you to walk only in three directions—along the shore to the north, inland along the highway to Bastia, and on the other side of the gulf, on the road to Sartene; the mountains close in on the fourth side. Footpaths wind among the vineyards, which adorn in great numbers the country to the north-east of Ajaccio.
In these vineyards are to be seen those curious watch-houses, which are peculiar to Ajaccio, and are called Pergoliti. They are formed of the stems of four young pines, which support a small hut, raised entirely above the ground, and thatched with straw. The watchman bears the dignified name of Baron. He is armed with a double-barrelled gun, and from time to time blows a blast on a conch or a shrill pipe made of clay, for the purpose of notifying his presence, and of terrifying robbers.
One evening, a hospitable old man conducted me into his vineyard on San Giovanni. He loaded me with bunches of beautiful Muscatel grapes, plucked almonds for me, and juicy plums and figs, which grow in luxuriant confusion among the vines. I happened to be passing along the road, when, after the hospitable manner of the country, he invited me to enter his garden. A very benevolent old man he was, and his reverend appearance reminded me strongly of the pictures of old age we find in the poems of Gleim's epoch, the touching simplicity of which often evidences a truer human wisdom than is discoverable in the most popular poems of our own time. Can there be seen a more beautiful picture than that of a cheerful and healthy old man in the garden planted by himself in his youth, the fruits of which he now kindly shares with the weary travellers by the wayside? Yes! thus peaceful and benevolent ought the close of man's life upon this earth to be.
The old man was talkative, praised this and that fruit, and described the processes necessary for raising a juicy growth. The vines are here trained to the height of four or five feet on poles, like beans, and in general four vines are planted with their tops bound together in a square shallow trough. The grape-harvest was large, but the disease had made its appearance in many places. The wine of Ajaccio is hot, like the Spanish. I found in this vineyard also, for the first time, the ripe fruit of the Indian fig-tree. After these trees have shed their cactus blossoms, the fruit ripens very rapidly. The fig is of a yellowish colour; the rind is peeled off, and only the inside of the fig eaten, which is unpleasantly sweet. Various attempts have been made to extract sugar from them. The power of growth displayed by this species of cactus, which grows in astonishing luxuriance round Ajaccio, is very remarkable. A leaf placed in the ground quickly strikes out roots, and becomes an independent plant. It requires the very least nourishment, and will grow on the thinnest soil.
A beautiful villa, in the castellated style, with Gothic towers, and immense imperial eagles carved in stone, stands near Mount San Giovanni. It belongs to Prince Bacciocchi.
The small fertile plain lying beyond, at the end of the bay, is called Campo Loro. The spirit of a sad event, which occurred in the Genoese war, hovers over this fruitful spot. Twenty-one herdsmen from Bastelica—all powerful men, worthy of Sampiero's canton—had taken up a position here. They made a brave stand against eight hundred Greeks and Genoese, till they were driven to a marsh, where they were surrounded and all killed, except one young man. This youth had thrown himself down among the dead, and, partly covered by the bodies of his companions, escaped slaughter for a time. But the Genoese afterwards came upon the field for the purpose of cutting off the heads of the fallen, and setting them up on the walls of the citadel. They raised the young herdsman, and brought him before their lieutenant. Condemned to death, he, the last of the little band, was led through the streets of Ajaccio with six of his companions' heads hung round him, and was afterwards quartered, and his body exposed upon the wall to the birds of prey.
At one end of this plain lies the Botanical Garden, which Ajaccio owes to Louis XVI., and which was commenced under the superintendence of Carlo Bonaparte. Its original purpose was the acclimatizing of foreign plants, which were intended to be introduced into France. This garden, sheltered by high mountains from the cold winds, and lying exposed to the noonday sun, contains the noblest productions of foreign countries, which, in the warm climate of Ajaccio, thrive in the open air. You can walk here among splendid magnolias, those wonderful plants called poincianas, tulip-trees, gleditschias, bignonias, tamarinds, and cedars of Lebanon. The cochineal insect is found on the mighty Indian fig-tree here, just as in Mexico.
The sight of this beautiful garden transports the mind to tropical regions; and, when standing among these wondrous, foreign trees, with our eyes fixed on the deep blue waters of the gulf, upon which the warm summer air broods, it is difficult not to imagine ourselves on the shores of some Mexican bay. The garden lies near the road to Bastia—the most frequented of all the highroads from Ajaccio. This is especially the case in the evening, when the townspeople return from their occupations in the country.
It was a favourite amusement with me to take a seat on the shore of the gulf, and to observe the passers-by. The women have all good figures, and their features are clear and delicate. I was often struck with the softness of their eyes and the fairness of their complexion. They wear the fazoletto, or mandile as a head-dress; on Sundays it is of white gauze, and contrasts well with the black faldetta. The peasant women generally wear round straw hats with very low crowns. Upon the straw hat they place a little cushion, and in this manner carry easily and conveniently very heavy burdens. The Corsican, like the Italian women, are distinguished by natural grace of deportment. I had frequent occasion to be delighted with the ease and grace of their movements. One day I met a young woman carrying fruit to the town. I requested her to sell me some. The maiden immediately removed her basket from her head, and, with the most perfect grace, requested me to take as much as I wished. With equal delicacy, she declined my offer of money. She was very poorly dressed. Afterwards, every time I met her in Ajaccio she returned my salutation with a grace which would have well become a lady of the noblest birth.
A man gallops past me. His pretty little wife has perhaps just gone before him, laden with a bundle of brushwood or fodder, while her indolent husband has come from the mountains, where he has been doing nothing all day but waiting for an opportunity to shoot some mortal enemy. When I see these half savages alone, or in companies of three or six, on horseback or on foot, all armed with their double-barrelled guns, I can hardly persuade myself that the country is not permanently in a state of war. Even the peasant, who sits on his hay-cart, has his gun slung upon his shoulder. I counted in half an hour twenty-six men armed with double-barrelled guns, who passed me on their way to Ajaccio. The people in the neighbourhood of Ajaccio are known to be the most quarrelsome in the island.
The appearance of these men is often bold and picturesque; often, too, frightfully hideous, and even ridiculous. You see them on their small horses, men of short stature—generally about Napoleon's height—with jet-black hair and beard, deep bronze complexion, in brownish-black jacket of a shaggy material, trowsers of the same sort, their double-barrelled gun on their shoulder, the round yellow zucca—usually filled with water—strapped to their back, the pouch of goat-skin or fox-skin, stuffed with bread, cheese, and other necessaries, the shot-belt buckled round the waist, with the leathern tobacco-pouch attached. Thus is the Corsican horseman equipped; and thus he lies all day in the field, while his wife is hard at work. I could never repress a feeling of annoyance and disgust when I saw these furious fellows—two generally on one horse, spurring him on unmercifully—pass me at a gallop, and turned to look upon the beautiful shores of the gulf, where not a single village is visible. The soil might produce a hundred kinds of fruit, while at present it is overgrown with rosemary, thorns, thistles, and wild olives.
The walk along the shore, on the north side of the bay, is delightful. It is a pleasure, during the prevalence of a light breeze, to watch the waves breaking upon the granite reefs, and covering them with their pure white foam. On the right rise mountains, which, near the town, are covered with olive-trees, but beyond, and as far as Cape Muro, are bleak and desert.
On this part of the coast stands, close to the sea, the small Greek chapel. I have not been able to discover why it bears this name—dedicated as it is to the Madonna del Carmine, and bearing a tablet with the name of the family of Pozzo di Borgo—Puteo Borgensis—inscribed upon it. It was probably ceded to the Greeks on their arrival at Ajaccio. The Genoese had settled the colony of Mainotes at Paomia, which lies a considerable distance above Ajaccio. These industrious colonists were continually threatened by the Corsicans. Hating and despising the intruders—whose settlement had flourished in a remarkable degree—they stabbed the husbandman at the plough, shot the vine-dresser in his vineyard, and laid waste the fields and gardens. In the year 1731, the poor Greeks were expelled from their settlement; they fled to Ajaccio, where they were quartered by the Genoese, to whom they had always remained faithful, in three separate divisions of the town. When the island fell into the hands of the French, they were allowed to settle in Cargese. They brought this part of the country into a high state of cultivation, but had hardly time to become properly domesticated before the Corsicans again fell upon them, in the year 1793, set fire to their houses, slaughtered their cattle, destroyed their vineyards, and forced them to flee once more to Ajaccio. In 1797, General Casabianca led the poor wanderers back to Cargese, where they now live in peace and safety. All peculiarities in their manners and customs have disappeared; they speak Corsican, like their troublesome neighbours, and among themselves a corrupt kind of Greek. Cargese lies on the sea, north from Ajaccio, and not far from the baths of Vico and Guagno.
On the same part of the coast are scattered many small chapels, in various forms—round, polygonal, with and without cupolas, and some in the shape of sarcophagi and temples, surrounded by white walls, and overhung with cypresses and weeping willows. These are the country-houses of the dead—family burying-places. Their situation on the sea-shore, in sight of the beautiful gulf, standing, too, among green trees and shrubs, and the elegant Moorish style in which they are built, give a very pleasant and romantic appearance to the country. The Corsican has strong antipathies to being buried in a public churchyard; he follows the ancient custom of the patriarchs, and prefers to rest with his fathers on his own possessions. Thus the whole island is covered with small tombs, often in the most beautiful situations, and heightening greatly the picturesque appearance of the landscape.
Walking further on towards Cape Muro, where the traveller sees, close to the shore, several red granite cliffs—the Bloody Islands, as they are called—on which stand a lighthouse and several Genoese watch-towers, I found some fishermen engaged in drawing a net to land. They stood in rows of from ten to twelve men, each company pulling in a long rope, to which the net was fastened. These ropes are more than a hundred and fifty yards long on each side; the part pulled in is neatly and cleverly arranged in a round coil. In three-quarters of an hour the net was on shore, heavy with fish. When they spread it out on the beach, such a spluttering, and leaping, and bounding, and springing! The fish were mostly anchovies, the largest were ray-fish (razza), very similar to our Baltic flinder. They carry a sharp and painful sting at the end of their long tails. The fishermen lay the ray-fish very carefully on the ground, and sever the tail from the body with a knife. They were an industrious and active body of men, of a powerful build; for the Corsicans are as active and useful on sea as among their native mountains. The old granite mountains and the sea develop and determine, on the one side and on the other, the character of the island and its population; and thus the Corsicans are naturally divided into two powerful bodies—herdsmen and fishermen. The fishery in the neighbourhood of Ajaccio is, as in all the bays of the island, of great importance. In April, the tunny coasts along the shores of Spain, France, and Genoa, and makes its appearance in the Corsican channel; the shark is its sworn enemy. It also is often seen in these seas, but it does not come near the shore.
Returning in the twilight from this sea-side walk to Ajaccio, the report of a gun at no great distance among the hills, struck my ear. Presently a man came running up to me and inquired in an excited manner: "You heard the shot?" "Yes." "Did you see any one?" "No." He then left me. Two sbirri passed. "What was it?" I inquired. "Some one has been murdered, we suppose." A walk in the country may be diversified in this island by somewhat dramatic occurrences. Death breathes around one everywhere, and the beauty of Nature herself has here the sad charm of melancholy and gloom.