On the following day, I drove in a char-à-banc to Calvi. Little Camillo was standing beside the vehicle as I stepped into it, and said sorrowfully: Non me piace che tu ci abbandoni—I'm not pleased that you're going to leave us. The wanderer fills his note-book with sketches of mountain, stream, and town, records deeds honourable and vile, why not for once preserve the picture of a beautiful child? When long years have elapsed, the face still returns upon our inward vision, and haunts the memory like a lovely song.
CHAPTER IV.
FROM ISOLA ROSSA TO CALVI.
My vetturino was not long in informing me that I had the honour of travelling in an extraordinary vehicle. "For," said he, "in this same char-à-banc I drove last year the three great bandits—Arrighi, Massoni, and Xaver. They came up to me as I was driving along, all armed to the teeth, and ordered me to take them to Calvi. I did so without saying a word, and after that they let me turn back unharmed. Now they are all dead."
The road from Isola Rossa to Calvi keeps constantly by the coast. The ruins of many villages, destroyed by the Saracens, are visible on the hills. Above Monticello lie the ruins of a castle which belonged to the famous Giudice della Rocca, the lieutenant of the Pisans. This righteous judge of his people still lives in the memory of the Corsicans. He was just, they tell, even towards the brutes. One day he heard an unusual bleating among the lambs of a flock in the Balagna; he asked the shepherd what ailed them, and the man confessed that they were bleating for hunger, as the milk had been taken from their dams. Giudice thereupon ordered that the sheep should henceforth not be milked till the lambs were satisfied.
The first town I passed was Algajola, a seaport of considerable antiquity, but with only two hundred inhabitants. Lying in ruins, as the bombs of the English left it sixty years ago, it bears mournful and striking testimony to the present state of Corsica. Even the inhabited houses resemble black ruins. A friendly old man, whom the wars of Napoleon had at one time taken as far as Berlin, showed me what was remarkable in Algajola, pointing out to me a great heap of stones as the Palazzo della Communità. In the time of the Genoese, Algajola was the central point of the Balagna; and as it was so situated that the inhabitants of every village in the province could travel to it and return home the same day, the Genoese fortified it, and raised it to a residency of one of their lieutenants of the island.
But the most notable thing about the little town is its story of two faithful lovers, Chiarina and Tamante. The French had condemned Tamante to death; but his true-love armed herself, and with the aid of her friends rescued him from execution. The noble deeds that spring from faithful love are everywhere honoured by the people, and become immortal in their traditions; the story of Chiarina and Tamante is popular over the whole of Italy, and I have found it selling as a cheap pamphlet in the streets of Rome.
On the shore near Algajola there is a quarry of singularly beautiful blue granite. I saw a pillar there which would do honour to an Indian or Egyptian temple. It is sixty feet in length, and twelve feet in diameter. It has been lying for years neglected on the field, exposed to the injuries of the weather, and noticed at most by the passing traveller, or the eagle that alights on it. Originally intended for a monument to Napoleon in Ajaccio, it was never removed from the quarry, as the necessary sum could not be raised for its transport. It will probably now be conveyed to Paris. The enormous block which supports the Vendôme pillar in Paris is also of this same exquisite granite of Algajola. With what just pride, therefore, may the Corsican stand before that pillar of Austerlitz, and tell the French: "My country produced both the great man up yonder, and the glorious granite on which he stands."
By and bye I reached Lumio, a high-lying village, whose black-brown, tower-like houses it had been at a distance totally impossible to distinguish from the rocks. Green jalousies marked here and there the house of a man of some means. Descendants of the ancient seigniors still live in all these villages; and men of the proudest names, and endless pedigree, live in the gloomy paeses of Corsica among the common people, and mix in their society. Nowhere in the world, perhaps, is so much democratic equality in social life to be found as in this island, where distinctions of rank are hardly ever visible, and the peasant conducts himself before the noble with the upright bearing of an independent man, as I have often myself seen. Above Calvi, in this region, lives Peter Napoleon, Lucian's son—at the time I was in Corsica the only Bonaparte resident on the native island of the family. The Balagnese are fond of him; they say he is a good hunter, associates freely with the shepherds, and has not forgotten that his forefathers belonged to the Corsicans. The election of Louis Napoleon of course filled the Corsican people with pride and exultation. I found the portrait of this man everywhere throughout the island, and heard his energy praised as Corsican energy. Men of more insight, however, did not allow their patriotism to carry them so far; and I heard Corsicans express the opinion that the Napoleons were tyrants, and the last oppressors of liberty.
Lumio has many orange-orchards, and such an astonishing quantity of cactus-hedges as I found nowhere else, except at Calvi. The cactus has here the size and stem of a tree. The view of the valley and gulf of Calvi from the mountains of Lumio is very beautiful. Calvi lies on a tongue of land at the foot of the hills of Calenzana. With its dark flat houses, two cupolas rising high above them, and the walls of the fort, which stands at the extreme end of the little peninsula, it has a striking resemblance to a Moorish city.