A CORSICAN ELECTION.
"Pozzonegro, near Sartène.
"I am able at last to write you of my movements, my dear Monsieur Joyeuse. In the five days that we have been in Corsica we have travelled about so much, talked so much, changed carriages and steeds so often, riding sometimes on mules, sometimes on asses, and sometimes even on men's backs to cross streams, have written so many letters, made notes on so many petitions, given away so many chasubles and altar-cloths, propped up so many tottering church steeples, founded so many asylums, proposed and drunk so many toasts, absorbed so much talk and Talano wine and white cheese, that I have found no time to send an affectionate word to the little family circle around the big table, from which I have been missing for two weeks. Luckily my absence will not last much longer, for we expect to leave day after to-morrow and travel straight through to Paris. So far as the election is concerned, I fancy that our trip has been successful. Corsica is a wonderful country, indolent and poor, a mixture of poverty and of pride which makes both the noble and bourgeois families keep up a certain appearance of opulence even at the price of the most painful privations. They talk here in all seriousness of the great wealth of Popolasca, the indigent deputy whom death robbed of the hundred thousand francs his resignation in the Nabob's favor would have brought him. All these people have, moreover, a frenzied longing for offices, an administrative mania, a craving to wear a uniform of some sort and a flat cap on which they can write: "Government clerk." If you should give a Corsican peasant his choice between the richest farm in Beauce and the baldric of the humblest forest-warden, he would not hesitate a moment, he would choose the baldric. Under such circumstances you can judge whether a candidate with a large fortune and governmental favors at his disposal has a good chance of being elected. Elected M. Jansoulet will be, therefore, especially if he succeeds in the move which he is making at this moment and which has brought us to the only inn of a small village called Pozzonegro (Black Well), a genuine well, all black with verdure, fifty cottages built of red stone clustered around a church of the Italian type, in the bottom of a ravine surrounded by steep hills, by cliffs of bright-colored sandstone, scaled by vast forests of larches and junipers. Through my open window, at which I am writing, I can see a bit of blue sky overhead, the orifice of the black well; below, on the little square, shaded by an enormous walnut tree, as if the shadows were not dense enough already, two shepherds dressed in skins are playing cards on the stone curb of a fountain. Gambling is the disease of this country of sloth, where the crops are harvested by men from Lucca. The two poor devils before me could not find a sou in their pockets; one stakes his knife, the other a cheese wrapped in vine leaves, the two stakes being placed beside them on the stone. A little curé is watching them, smoking his cigar, and apparently taking the liveliest interest in their game.
"And that is all—not a sound anywhere except the regular dropping of the water on the stone, the exclamations of one of the gamblers, who swears by the sango del seminario; and in the common-room of the inn, under my chamber, our friend's earnest voice, mingled with the buzzing of the illustrious Paganetti, who acts as interpreter in his conversation with the no less illustrious Piedigriggio.
"M. Piedigriggio (Grayfoot) is a local celebrity. He is a tall old man of seventy-five, still very erect in his short cloak over which his long white beard falls, his brown woollen Catalan cap on his hair, which is also white, a pair of scissors in his belt, which he uses to cut the great leaves of green tobacco in the hollow of his hand; a venerable old fellow in fact, and when he crossed the square and shook hands with the curé, with a patronizing smile at the two gamblers, I never would have believed that I had before me the famous brigand Piedigriggio, who, from 1840 to 1860, held the thickets in Monte-Rotondo, tired out gendarmes and troops of the line, and who to-day, his seven or eight murders with the rifle or the knife being outlawed by lapse of time, goes his way in peace throughout the region that saw his crimes, and is a man of considerable importance. This is the explanation: Piedigriggio has two sons, who, following nobly in his footsteps, have toyed with the rifle and now hold the thickets in their turn. Impossible to lay hands upon or to find, as their father was for twenty years, informed by the shepherds of the movements of the gendarmerie, as soon as the gendarmes leave a village, the brigands appear there. The older of the two, Scipion, came last Sunday to Pozzonegro to hear mass. To say that people are fond of them, and that the grasp of the bloodstained hand of these villains is agreeable to all those who receive it, would be to calumniate the pacific inhabitants of this commune; but they fear them, and their will is law.
"Now it appears that the Piedigriggios have taken it into their heads to espouse the cause of our rival in the election, a formidable alliance, which may cause two whole cantons to vote against us, for the knaves have legs as long, in proportion, as the range of their guns. Naturally we have the gendarmes with us, but the brigands are much more powerful. As our host said to us this morning: 'The gendarmes, they go, but the banditti, they stay.' In the face of that very logical reasoning, we realized that there was but one thing to do, to treat with the Piedigriggios, and make a bargain with them. The mayor said a word to the old man, who consulted his sons, and they are discussing the terms of the treaty downstairs. I can hear the Governor's voice from here: 'Nonsense, my dear fellow, I'm an old Corsican myself, you know.' And then the other's tranquil reply, cut simultaneously with his tobacco by the grating noise of the great scissors. The 'dear fellow' does not seem to have faith; and I am inclined to think that matters will not progress until the gold pieces ring on the table.
"The trouble is that Paganetti is well known in his native country. The value of his word is written on the public square at Corte which still awaits the monument to Paoli, in the vast crop of humbuggery that he has succeeded in planting in this sterile Ithacan island, and in the flabby, empty pocket-books of all the wretched village curés, petty bourgeois, petty noblemen, whose slender savings he has filched by dangling chimerical combinazioni before their eyes. Upon my word, he needed all his phenomenal assurance, together with the financial resources he now has at his command to satisfy all demands, to venture to show his face here again.
"After all, how much truth is there in these fabulous works undertaken by the Caisse Territoriale?