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....