Sartene suffered terribly from the Saracens. The Moors, after repeated attacks, surprised the town in the year 1583, and in one day carried off four hundred persons into captivity—the third part of the population at that time. From that date, Sartene has been defended by a strong wall.
To-day, standing in this quiet town, whose inhabitants are talking peacefully together under the large elm-tree, in the quaint, idyllic market-place, one cannot believe that revenge and the fiercer passions could find a lurking-place within its walls. And yet this town, after the Revolution of July, was for many years the scene of a horrible civil war. The citizens have been divided, since the year 1815, into two parties—the adherents of the family of Rocca Serra, and those of the family of Ortoli. The former party is composed of the richer inhabitants, who live in the quarter of Santa Anna; the latter, of the poorer classes occupying the Borgo. Both factions had intrenched themselves, barred their houses, shut their windows, and proceeded to make sorties upon each other, to shoot and to stab one another with the most furious zeal. The Rocca Serrans were the Whites or Bourbonists, the Ortoli the Reds or Liberals; the former had forbidden the opposite party admission into their quarter of the town; and the Ortoli, in contempt of this declaration, had formed a procession, and marched with flags flying into Santa Anna. The Rocca Serrans immediately ran to their arms, and shot at the procession from their windows, killed three men and wounded several others. This was the signal for a bloody combat. The day after, several hundred mountaineers came with their guns to the assistance of the Ortoli, and besieged Santa Anna. The Government despatched a body of soldiers, which had the effect of apparently restoring order. Both parties, however, continued hostilities, and many lives were lost on both sides. The hostile feeling continues to this day, although, after thirty-three years of deadly feud, the Rocca Serrans and the Ortoli, on the occasion of the election of Louis Napoleon as President, held a meeting of reconciliation, where their children were allowed to dance together.
Corsica, with these inextinguishable family feuds, presents the same picture as the Italian cities of Florence, Bologna, Verona, Padua, and Milan, several centuries ago. The Italian Middle Ages still survive in this island; and here still rage the same tumults described so picturesquely by Dino Compagni in his chronicles of Florence—that war of fellow-citizens, whom, as Dante complains, the same ditch surrounds and the same wall defends. But in Corsica, these feuds are much more remarkable and more terrible; raging, as they do, in districts of so small an extent, in villages with a population of not above one thousand souls, the inhabitants of which are indissolubly connected by the ties of blood and hospitality.
To-day the people of the town are assembled in the marketplace, where an odd sort of scaffolding is being erected, for the exhibition of fireworks, against the 15th of August, the anniversary of Napoleon's christening. It is not improbable that the festival may rekindle the flame, and these black houses may in a few days be transformed into little fortresses, from which shots of death will be scattered around. Here it was political feeling that stirred up the angry passions of the townspeople; in other districts strife has been kindled by a personal offence, or some accidental circumstance of the most trivial nature. The shooting of a goat has occasioned the death of sixteen men, and roused a whole canton to arms. A young man throws a piece of bread to his dog, another man's dog snatches it; and a feud arises between two parishes, with death and murder upon both sides. Causes of quarrel are never wanting at the communal elections, festivals, or dances; these are often extremely ridiculous. At Mariana, in the year 1832, a dead ass became the occasion of a bloody feud between two villages. A procession from one of the villages was proceeding, during Easter-week, to a chapel, on the road to which a dead ass was lying. Upon this, the sacristan began to curse the people who had thrown the ass upon the road, and had thus profaned the holy procession. Immediately there arose a quarrel between the people of Lucciana and those of Borgo—the parish to which the ass belonged; guns were unslung, and shots exchanged; the holy procession was suddenly transformed into a confused mass of combatants. The one parish threw the blame of the dead ass upon the other; the body was dragged from Borgo to Lucciana, and from Lucciana to Borgo; and these pilgrimages were on every occasion accompanied with fighting, shooting, and the furious shouts of battle.
It resembled the combat of the Greeks and Trojans for the dead body of Patroclus. The people of Borgo dragged the dead ass to the chapel of Lucciana, and flung it down at the door of the church; the Luccianese carried it off to Borgo, and after storming the village, fixed it on the church-tower. At last the Podestà seized the corpus delicti, already in a state of rapid decomposition, and none the better for its frequent travels, and the dead ass found a quiet resting-place in the grave. The poet Viale has written a comic Epopee on this occurrence, in the style of the Stolen Bucket of Bologna.
A detachment of ten gendarmes is at present stationed in Sartene. The same number is usually posted in the chief town of every canton, and in those villages which are particularly troublesome. The officer of the company was an Alsatian, who had lived twenty-two years in the island, seemingly quite happily, and without any expectation of meeting a countryman in Sartene. Whenever I meet an Alsatian or a Lothringian—the latter always speak very inaccurate German—I feel deep sorrow for these lost German brethren of mine. It always brings a pang to my heart, to think of a branch of the noble old German oak in the hands of the French. This officer had severe complaints to make regarding the dangerous service in which he was employed, and the petty warfare he had to carry on with the banditti. He pointed to a mountain in the distance—the lofty Incudine. "Look," said he, "yonder sits a captain of banditti, whom we have to hunt like a wild sheep. There are fifteen hundred francs on his head, but they are not so easy to win. A few days ago we apprehended twenty-nine men who had been carrying provisions to the fellow. I have them here in the barracks."
"What will be their punishment?"
"A year's imprisonment, if they are convicted. They are herdsmen or mountain-people, friends and relations of the bandit."
Poor Corsica! what, under circumstances like these, is to become of thy industry and thy agriculture!
The view of the dark mountain of Incudine where the poor bandit is sitting, and the recollection of the feuds of Sartene, recall to my mind some stories from the inexhaustible stores of the Corsican romance of revenge. Let us sit down together upon a rock, in sight of these glorious mountains, and the waters of the Gulf of Valinco, and listen to two stories about Corsican guns and their owners.