“What becomes of you, then?”
“We die.”
Paoli himself escaped on board a British ship. He lay during the voyage hidden in a sea-chest, in case the vessel should be boarded and searched by a French cruiser. When he landed at Leghorn he was greeted by the people rather as a hero and a conqueror than as one who had just suffered complete defeat upon the field. He made his way to England, and here he received a pension of £1,200 a year, which enabled him to live comfortably in London. Boswell, the friend of Dr. Johnson, had once visited Paoli in Corsica, and he now introduced the exile to his friends. He tells us: “On the evening of October 10 (1769) I presented Dr. Johnson to General Paoli. I had greatly wished that two men for whom I had the highest esteem should meet. They met with manly ease. General Paoli spoke Italian and Dr. Johnson English, and understood one another very well with a little interpretation from me, in which I compared myself to an isthmus which joins two great continents together.”
Paoli’s own account of how he first met Boswell is told by an English lady[C] who, in writing down what she heard, used the actual words of the speaker. Paoli said to her: “He came to my country, and he fetched me some letter of recommending him; but I was of the belief he might be an impostor and one spy; and I only find I was the monster he had come to see. Oh! he is a very good man. I love him indeed; so cheerful! so gay! so pleasant! but at the first, oh! I was indeed angry.”
[C] Fanny Burney.
And he told the same lady another little story about himself in the same queer broken English: “I walk out in the night—I go towards the field; I behold a man—oh, ugly one! I proceed—he follow; I go on—he address me: ‘You have one dog,’ he says. ‘Yes,’ say I to him. ‘Is he a fierce dog?’ he says. ‘Is he fiery?’ ‘Yes,’ reply I, ‘he can bite.’ ‘I would not attack in the night,’ says he, ‘a house to have such a dog in it.’ Then I conclude he is a breaker, so I turn to him—oh, very rough, not gentle—and I say, very fierce, ‘He shall destroy you, if you are ten.’”
When Pascal left the island after the Battle of Ponte Nuovo, his brother Clement continued the fighting for a little while; but when he knew that the General was safe, he gave up the struggle, went to Florence, and became a monk. This Clement was a very religious man, and it is said that always, on the field of battle, every shot that he fired was accompanied by a prayer for the soul of the man that it might slay.
When the French Revolution broke out, the Corsicans made yet another attempt to regain their freedom, and Paoli was sent back to the island as Lieutenant-Governor, with full control over the whole military system of Corsica. On his arrival at Marseilles he was met by a body of his countrymen, who had come to welcome and escort him home. Amongst those who greeted him with great rejoicing was the young Napoleon. Before long Paoli became disgusted with the murders that were being committed in the name of Liberty by the mob at Paris. Five days after the French King had been executed by his own subjects, Corsica declared herself free of France, and Paoli was elected Commander-in-Chief and ruler of the island. “Long live Paoli!” they shouted. “Paoli shall reign over us! We agree to all that he asks. Vengeance and ruin to his enemies!”
It was soon evident, however, that the Corsicans could not preserve their independence against so powerful a foe, and upon the advice of Paoli, and with the approval of a number of Corsican nobles, the crown was offered to George III., the King of England. It was accepted on his behalf by Sir George Elliott. The mass of the people was still dissatisfied. They wanted to govern themselves, and they loved the English no better than they had loved the Saracen, the Genoese, or the French. After two years England abandoned the island, and it then passed again into the possession of the French, who hold it to this day.
A year before the English forces left the island, Paoli had been requested to return to London, as his presence in Corsica was found to be rather inconvenient in many ways. He obeyed the summons to return, and he lived in London for the next twelve years on a pension of £2,000 a year, granted to him by the English King. He died at the age of eighty-two, and was buried in old St. Pancras Churchyard. In 1889 his body was taken back to the land for which he had so bravely fought, and was laid to rest in his native village.