The only occasion on which the women of Corsica appear to have an outing is on Sunday morning, after early Mass, when, in their neat attire of black and white, they sometimes take a quiet turn up and down the main street or place.
A funeral, too, may bring them out. On passing through Olmeto some weeks afterwards, we met half a dozen women coming down the road together, dressed rather more gaily than usual; and our driver immediately remarked, "There must be a funeral in Olmeto, or the women would not be out."
"But," we asked, "do they not put on mourning for the occasion?"
"Oh no; only the relatives do that."
"But," we said, "there are so many people always dressed in black in Corsica; how is that?"
"Well, people only go into mourning for a very near relation; but the first time they wear it for three or four years, and the second time, unless they are young children, for the rest of their life."
This accounts for the number of sombre female figures one sees in this island, the black handkerchief which is worn over the head rendering them peculiarly funereal-looking; and explains why you never meet an elderly woman in any other attire.
But the group of women we met were evidently only acquaintances or distant relations of the dead, for their costume was more than usually lively, one or two of them wearing a blue or orange head-gear and other unaccustomed bits of finery. The ceremony appeared to them, no doubt, in the light of an agreeable dissipation, as it did to a certain poor Welshwoman of my acquaintance, who remarked, cheerfully, that "Mother had a' been quite gay lately; she'd a' been to three funerals last week!"
The church at Corte is in the higher part of the town, surrounded by narrow streets and houses that have lain in ruins ever since the last bombardment of the town. It is not a pretentious building, either within or without.
Poor paintings and gaudy images of saints bedecked every side altar, and a highly coloured Madonna stood in a niche on either side of the principal altar, where the tall candles shed artificial sunlight on beautiful but badly arranged flowers.