Wanderings in Corsica: Its History and Its Heroes. Vol. 2 of 2

by Ferdinand Gregorovius

Ajaccio lies on a tongue of land, the extremity of which is occupied by the castle. Portions of the town stretch on each side of this tongue along the gulf. The avenue of elms and planes which leads into the city is continued along its main street—the Cours Napoleon, which is properly the prolongation of the road from Corte. Part of it has had to be blasted through the rocks, two of which still stand at the entrance of the town, close to the houses. In the Corso itself the elms give place to orange-trees of considerable size, which give the street a rich and festive look. The houses are high, but destitute of architectural merit. The gray jalousies are characteristic; this is the colour preferred in Corsica, while in Italy they are usually of a lively green. The gray gives to the buildings a dead, monotonous air. All the more considerable edifices of the Corso stand on the right side; the little Theatre, the Prefecture—a handsome building—and the military barracks.

The rural quiet pervading these streets of Ajaccio surprised me; but their names speak loudly to the traveller, and relate the history of Napoleon. You read Cours Napoleon, Rue Napoleon, Rue Fesch, Rue Cardinal, Place Letitia, and Rue du Roi de Rome, which last awakens mournful recollections. The memory of Napoleon is the proper soul of the town, and you saunter onwards, out of one little street into another, musing on the wonderful man and his childhood, and soon you have wandered through them all. The Rue Fesch runs parallel with the Cours Napoleon; the former leads to the spacious Place du Diamant, which lies on the shore, and has beautiful view of the gulf and its southern coast; the latter ends in the market-place (du marché), and leads to the harbour. These are the two principal streets and squares of Ajaccio. Narrow lanes connect them, and intersect the whole of the tongue of land. The silence invites memory and thought, and silently the mirror of the blue gulf stretches away before the view. You see it from almost every street. The eye is nowhere imprisoned by walls, for the main streets are wide, the squares spacious, planted with green trees; and the sea, and green olive-clad hills, which rise close upon the city, look in upon you wherever you go or stand. Ajaccio is at once an inland and a coast town—you live there in the heart of Nature.

In the cool of the evening, the Corso and Diamond Place grew livelier. The military band began to play in the Place; the people gathered here and there in groups, or moved about. Most of the women wore black veils, those of the middle classes were enveloped in the black faldetta. It was easy to imagine you were in some city of Spain.

The Ajaccians have the finest promenades in the world, whether they choose the beautiful esplanade which has so romantic a name, or the walks along the gulf among alleys of elms, and through vineyards and olive-gardens. I know few promenades from which so fine a view is to be had as that from the quiet Place du Diamant in Ajaccio. Immediately in front of it the murmuring sea; towards the land cheerful rows of houses; among them, a stately military hospital and a handsome Catholic College; close over these houses a green hill. A stone breastwork runs along the side next the gulf; a few steps bring you to the strand, which is fringed by an alley of trees.

I found nothing in Ajaccio more pleasant than to wander about on the Place du Diamant in the evening, when the west wind blew fresh over the gulf, or to sit on the breastwork, and feast my eyes on the magic panorama of sea and hills. The sky of Italy is then lit up with a brilliance as of fairy-land; the air is so clear that the Milky Way and the planet Venus throw long lines of radiance across the gulf, and the waves reflect a mild splendour. Where they are in motion, or are furrowed by a passing skiff, they tremble with phosphorescent sparks. Above, the shore wraps itself in night; the beacons gleam from the headlands, and on the hills you see in many places great fires blazing. They are burning copsewood there—a practice common in the month of August, in order to gain land for tillage, which is at the same time manured by the ashes. These fires continue to burn for days. During the day they roll white clouds of smoke over the hills, at night they glare over the gulf like volcanoes, and then the resemblance to the Gulf of Naples becomes striking. A magnificent illumination may thus be enjoyed every evening on the Diamond Place of Ajaccio.

The market-place is no less beautiful, though it affords a less comprehensive view. You see from it the safe and beautiful harbour, confined by a granite mole erected by Napoleon. On the side of the harbour, a beautiful quay of granite bounds the market-place, which, planted with trees, has a look of rural peace. At its entrance stands the principal fountain in Ajaccio, a large cube of marble, from the sides of which the water gushes into semi-circular basins. It is thronged from morning till night with women and children drawing water; and I could never look on these groups without being reminded of Old Testament scenes of the same character. In warm countries, the wells are the very fountains of poetry and sociable intercourse; well and hearth are the time-honoured centres round which human society has always gathered.—The women here do not draw their water in the antique vessels of metal used in Bastia, but in cask-shaped pitchers of terracotta, the handles of which lie across the mouths. These pitchers are also ancient; and another kind of earthenware pitcher, common in Ajaccio, with a long slender neck, has a thoroughly Etruscan look. The poor inhabitants of the barren island of Capraja support themselves partly by making these vessels, which are sent to great distances.

On the same market-place, behind the fountain, close upon the harbour and before the handsome town-house, stands a marble statue of Napoleon, on an excessively high and disagreeably tapering pedestal of granite. The inscription is as follows: "His native city to the Emperor Napoleon, on the 5th May 1850, the second year of the presidency of Louis Napoleon." Ajaccio had long been endeavouring to raise a monument to Napoleon, and always in vain. The arrival of a statue in Corsica was therefore an event of no small importance for the island. It chanced that the Bonaparte family on one occasion sent Signor Ramolino the statue of a Ganymede. The people seeing it as it was taken out of the vessel, took the eagle of Ganymede for the imperial eagle, and Ganymede himself for Napoleon; they assembled in the market-place, and demanded that the statue should forthwith be placed on the above-mentioned fountain, that they might at last have the great Napoleon in marble in the market-place. The worthy Corsicans, in thus turning the Trojan youth Ganymede into their countryman Napoleon, certainly seem to give some colour to the old fable of the chroniclers, that the Ajaccians are descended from a Trojan prince.

The beautiful statue of Napoleon, by the Florentine Bartolini, was originally intended for Ajaccio; but a disagreement arose about the price (60,000 francs), and Bartolini's work never became one of the ornaments of Ajaccio. The statue of Napoleon in the market-place is by Laboureur, and is only of mediocre merit; but its position, in full view of the gulf, gives it an admirable local effect. It is a consular statue. The consul looks from the pedestal upon the sea, turning from his little native town to the world-embracing element. He wears the Roman toga, and on his head a wreath of bays; his right hand grasps a rudder, which rests upon a ball representing the globe. The idea is happy; for in sight of the gulf the rudder appears a quite natural symbol, and is doubly significant in the hand of an islander. The mind of the beholder dwells here not on the history of the complete, but of the incipient ruler; for he sees around him the little world of Ajaccio, in which the mightiest European man went about as child and youth, unconscious who he was, and for what fate had destined him. Then the memory wanders from the market-place to the gulf, and sees the ship anchor there, which bore the General Napoleon Bonaparte from Egypt to France. During the night he sat on board that vessel, eagerly reading such newspapers as could be procured for him in Ajaccio; and it was here that he formed the resolution to seize that rudder with which he was to rule not France alone, but an empire and a hemisphere, till it broke in his hand, and the man of Corsica went to wreck on the island of St. Helena.

Very few vessels, some luggers, and one or two schooners, lie in the harbour. Not, like the Bay of San Fiorenzo, exposed to the maestrale, or north-west wind, but protected by its shores from every storm, this magnificent gulf is capable of sheltering in its roads the largest fleets. But the port is completely dull, and destitute of trade. Once a week, on Saturday, comes a steamer from Marseilles, and brings news of the world, and supplies of necessary articles. I have often heard Corsicans complain that the native city of Napoleon, though possessing the advantages of an incomparable situation, and an excellent climate, was nothing more than an ordinary little provincial town of France. You only need to walk round the market-place, where most of the shops are, on the ground-floors of the houses, to see how slow the sale of goods is, and how limited the native industry. You do not see a single shop where articles of luxury are sold—nothing but the most indispensable handicrafts, such as shoemaking and tailoring; and the wares that look most like to articles of luxury, seem old-fashioned and spoiled.

I found only one book-shop in Ajaccio: it was kept by a dealer in small wares, who sold soap, cordage, knives, and baskets as well as books. The town-house, however, contains, for Ajaccio, a highly considerable library, of 27,000 volumes. It was founded by Lucian Bonaparte, and the opinion is, that he has done greater service to his country in connexion with this library, than by his epic in twelve cantos: La Cyrneïde. The prefecture also possesses a valuable library, which is particularly rich in archives and important documents of Corsican history.