"The Corsicans inter their dead expensively; for they bury them not without exequies, without laments, without panegyric, without dirges, without prayer. For their funeral solemnities are very similar to those of the Romans. One of the neighbours raises the cry, and calls to the nearest village: 'Ho there! cry to the other village, for such a one is just dead.' Then they assemble according to their villages, their towns, and their communities, walking one by one in a long line—first the men and then the women. When these arrive, all raise a great wailing, and the wife and brothers tear the clothes upon their breast. The women, disfigured with weeping, smite themselves on the bosom, lacerate the face, and tear out the hair.—All Corsicans are free."
The reader will have found that this picture of the Corsicans resembles in many points the description Tacitus gives us of the ancient Germans.
Corsican historiography has at no time flourished more than during the heroic fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it was silent during the seventeenth, because at that period the entire people lay in a state of death-like exhaustion; in the eighteenth, participating in the renewed vitality of the age, it again became active, and we have Natali's treatise Disinganno sulla guerra di Corsica, and Salvini's Giustificazione dell' Insurrezione—useful books, but of no great literary merit.
Dr. Limperani wrote a History of Corsica to the end of the seventeenth century, a work full of valuable materials, but prosy and long-winded. Very serviceable—in fact, from the documents it contains, indispensable—is the History of the Corsicans, by Cambiaggi, in four quarto volumes. Cambiaggi dedicated his work to Frederick the Great, the admirer of Pasquale Paoli and Corsican heroism.
Now that the Corsican people have lost their freedom, the learned patriots of Corsica—and Filippini would no longer have to complain of the dearth of literary cultivation among his countrymen—have devoted themselves with praiseworthy zeal to the history of their country. These men are generally advocates. We have, for example, Pompei's book, L'Etat actuel de la Corse; Gregori edited Filippini and Peter Cyrnæus, and made a collection of the Corsican Statutes—a highly meritorious work. These laws originated in the old traditionary jurisprudence of the Corsicans, which the democracy of Sampiero adopted, giving it a more definite and comprehensive form. They underwent further additions and improvements during the supremacy of the Genoese, who finally, in the sixteenth century, collected them into a code. They had become extremely scarce. The new edition is a splendid monument of Corsican history, and the codex itself does the Genoese much credit. Renucci, another talented Corsican, has written a Storia di Corsica, in two volumes, published at Bastia in 1833, which gives an abridgment of the earlier history, and a detailed account of events during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, up to 1830. The work is rich in material, but as a historical composition feeble. Arrighi wrote biographies of Sampiero and Pasquale Paoli. Jacobi's work in two volumes is the History of Corsica in most general use. It extends down to the end of the war of independence under Paoli, and is to be completed in a third volume. Jacobi's merit consists in having written a systematically developed history of the Corsicans, using all the available sources; his book is indispensable, but defective in critical acumen, and far from sufficiently objective. The latest book on Corsican history, is an excellent little compendium by Camillo Friess, keeper of the Archives in Ajaccio, who told me he proposed writing at greater length on the same subject. He has my best wishes for the success of such an undertaking, for he is a man of original and vigorous intellect. It is to be hoped he will not, like Jacobi, write his work in French, but, as he is bound in duty to his people, in Italian.
CHAPTER II.
ROUSSEAU AND THE CORSICANS.
I did not neglect to visit the house of Count Matteo Buttafuoco, which was at one time to have been the domicile of Rousseau. It is a structure of considerable pretensions, the stateliest in Vescovato. Part of it is at present occupied by Marshal Sebastiani, whose family belongs to the neighbouring village of Porta.
This Count Buttafuoco is the same man against whom Napoleon wrote an energetic pamphlet, when a fiery young democrat in Ajaccio. The Count was an officer in the French army when he invited Jean Jacques Rousseau to Vescovato. The philosopher of Geneva had, in his Contrat Social, written and prophesied as follows with regard to Corsica: "There is still one country in Europe susceptible of legislation—the island of Corsica. The vigour and perseverance displayed by the Corsicans, in gaining and defending their freedom, are such as entitle them to claim the aid of some wise man to teach them how to preserve it. I have an idea that this little island will one day astonish Europe." When the French were sending out their last and decisive expedition against Corsica, Rousseau wrote: "It must be confessed that your French are a very servile race, a people easily bought by despotism, and shamefully cruel to the unfortunate; if they knew of a free man at the other end of the world, I believe they would march all the way thither, for the mere pleasure of exterminating him."
I shall not affirm that this was a second prophecy of Rousseau's, but the first has certainly been fulfilled, for the day has come in which the Corsicans have astonished Europe.