On the same day, towards midnight, the unhappy Murat embarked, and, as his little squadron left the harbour of Ajaccio, several cannon-shots were fired at it from the citadel, by order of the commandant; it was said the cannons had only been loaded with powder. The expedition consisted of five small vessels besides a fast-sailing felucca called the Scorridora, under the command of Barbarà, and in these there were in all two hundred men, inclusive of subaltern officers, twenty-two officers, and a few sailors.
The voyage was full of disasters. Fortune—that once more favoured Napoleon when, seven months previously, he sailed from Elba with his six ships and eight hundred men to regain his crown—had no smiles for Murat. It is touching to see how the poor ex-king, his heart tossed with anxieties and doubts, hovers hesitatingly on the Calabrian coast; how he is forsaken by his ships, and repelled as if by the warning hand of fate from the unfriendly shore; how he is even at one time on the point of making sail for Trieste, and saving himself in Austria, and yet how at last the chivalrous dreamer, his mental vision haunted unceasingly by the deceptive semblance of a crown, adopts the fantastic and fatal resolution of landing in Pizzo.
"Murat," said the man who told me so much of Murat's days in Ajaccio, and who had been an eye-witness of what passed then, "was a brilliant cavalier with very little brains." It is true enough. He was the hero of a historical romance, and you cannot read the story of his life without being profoundly stirred. He sat his horse better than a throne. He had never learnt to govern; he had only, what born kings frequently have not, a kingly bearing, and the courage to be a king; and he was most a king when he had ceased to be acknowledged as such: this ci-devant waiter in his father's tavern, Abbé, and cashiered subaltern, fronted his executioners more regally than Louis XVI., of the house of Capet, and died not less proudly than Charles of England, of the house of Stuart.
A servant showed me the rooms in Franceschetti's in which Murat had lived. The walls were hung with pictures of the battles in which he had signalized himself, such as Marengo, Eylau, the military engagement at Aboukir, and Borodino. His portrait caught my eye instantly. The impassioned and dreamy eye, the brown curling hair falling down over the forehead, the soft romantic features, the fantastic white dress, the red scarf, were plainly Joachim's. Under the portrait I read these words—"1815. Tradito!!! abbandonato!!! li 13 Octobre assassinato!!!" (betrayed, forsaken; on the 13th of October, murdered);—groanings of Franceschetti's, who had accompanied him to Pizzo. The portrait of the General hangs beside that of Murat, a high warlike form, with a physiognomy of iron firmness, contrasting forcibly with the troubadour face of Joachim. Franceschetti sacrificed his all for Murat—he left wife and child to follow him; and although he disapproved of the undertaking of his former king, kept by his side to the last. An incident which was related to me, and which I also saw mentioned in the General's Mémoires, indicates great nobility of character, and does honour to his memory. When the rude soldiery of Pizzo were pressing in upon Murat, threatening him with the most brutal maltreatment, Franceschetti sprang forward and cried, "I—I am Murat!" The stroke of a sabre stretched him on the earth, just as Murat rushed to intercept it by declaring who he was. All the officers and soldiers who were taken prisoners with Murat at Pizzo were thrown into prison, wounded or not, as it might happen. After Joachim's execution, they and Franceschetti were taken to the citadel of Capri, where they remained for a considerable time, in constant expectation of death, till at length the king sent the unhoped-for order for their release. Franceschetti returned to Corsica; but he had scarcely landed, when he was seized by the French as guilty of high treason, and carried away to the citadel of Marseilles. The unfortunate man remained a prisoner in Provence for several years, but was at length set at liberty, and allowed to return to his family in Vescovato. His fortune had been ruined by Murat; and this general, who had risked his life for his king, saw himself compelled to send his wife to Vienna to obtain from the wife of Joachim a partial re-imbursement of his outlay, and, as the journey proved fruitless, to enter into a protracted law-process with Caroline Murat, in which he was nonsuited at every stage. Franceschetti died in 1836. His two sons, retired officers, are among the most highly respected men in Corsica, and have earned the gratitude of their countrymen by the improvements they have introduced in agriculture.
His wife, Catharina Ceccaldi, now far advanced in years, still lives in the same house in which she once entertained Murat as her guest. I found the noble old lady in one of the upper rooms, engaged in a very homely employment, and surrounded with pigeons, which fluttered out of the window as I entered; a scene which made me feel instantly that the healthy and simple nature of the Corsicans has been preserved not only in the cottages of the peasantry, but also among the upper classes. I thought of her brilliant youth, which she had spent in the beautiful Naples, and at the court of Joachim; and in the course of the conversation she herself referred to the time when General Franceschetti, and Coletta, who has also published a special memoir on the last days of Murat, were in the service of the Neapolitan soldier-king. It is pleasant to see a strong nature that has victoriously weathered the many storms of an eventful life, and has remained true to itself when fortune became false; and I contemplated this venerable matron with reverence, as, talking of the great things of the past, she carefully split the beans for the mid-day meal of her children and grandchildren. She spoke of the time, too, when Murat lived in the house. "Franceschetti," she said, "made the most forcible representations to him, and told him unreservedly that he was undertaking an impossibility. Then Murat would say sorrowfully, 'You, too, want to leave me! Ah! my Corsicans are going to leave me in the lurch!' We could not resist him."
Leaving Vescovato, and wandering farther into the Casinca, I still could not cease thinking on Murat. And I could not help connecting him with the romantic Baron Theodore von Neuhoff, who, seventy-nine years earlier, landed on this same coast, strangely and fantastically costumed, as it had also been Murat's custom to appear. Theodore von Neuhoff was the forerunner in Corsica of those men who conquered for themselves the fairest crowns in the world. Napoleon obtained the imperial crown, Joseph the crown of Spain, Louis the crown of Holland, Jerome the crown of Westphalia—the land of which Theodore King of Corsica was a native,—the adventurer Murat secured the Norman crown of the Two Sicilies, and Bernadotte the crown of the chivalrous Scandinavians, the oldest knights of Europe. A hundred years before Theodore, Cervantes had satirized, in his Sancho Panza, the romancing practice of conferring island kingdoms in reward for conquering prowess, and now, a hundred years after him, the romance of Arthur and the Round Table repeats itself here on the boundaries of Spain, in the island of Corsica, and continues to be realized in the broad daylight of the nineteenth century, and our own present time.
I often thought of Don Quixote and the Spanish romances in Corsica. It seems to me as if the old knight of La Mancha were once more riding through the world's history; in fact, are not antique Spanish names again becoming historical, which were previously for the world at large involved in as much romantic obscurity as the Athenian Duke Theseus of the Midsummer Night's Dream?
CHAPTER V.
VENZOLASCA—CASABIANCA—THE OLD CLOISTER.
"Que todo se passa en flores