We did not see the princess, whose tame parrot kept calling from the upper regions. But we heard that her old servant's admiration of her amiability was not unmerited. This lady gave some pleasant réunions at her house last winter, at which some of the English, resident in Ajaccio, attended.
In some of the rooms were drawings by the late Prince Imperial, who, with his mother, some years ago, visited the home of the founder of their dynasty. The empress, then in the heyday of prosperity and glory, and little foreseeing the widowed exile so soon to come upon her, was yet deeply moved as she went through the deserted rooms, and shed tears of emotion.
Passing through the unpretentious doorway, we went up a stone staircase, three or four feet wide, until we reached the first storey. It consisted of a succession of six or seven rooms, all opening one into the other, and coming out finally at the other side of the little landing. The rooms were square and comfortable-looking, of a good size, most of them with chairs or armoires, or some articles of furniture left in them. Some of the tables and chests were very pretty, of marble, or inlaid with coloured woods.
On the first storey was the "reception-room"—a long, low apartment, from which the chandeliers had been removed, but still hung round with numerous small mirrors, and prettily painted. In this room M. Buonaparte (who was a man of position, his family being considered the second in Ajaccio, and he himself being rather a noted local orator and politician) received a good deal of society, assisted by his beautiful and graceful wife, Letitia Ramolini.
The portraits of Madame Mère, taken in her youth, some of which were hanging on the walls of her house, show us the spirituelle beauty, with her dark, brilliant eyes, her sweet smile, and her bewitching features.
Few women have had a more romantic life. Married at the age of seventeen, to a husband who fell passionately in love with her before she was much more than a child, and whose rank was scarcely equal to her own, her devotion to him and to her children was only equalled by her remarkable spirit and her natural ambition.
It is easy to see whence the first Napoleon gained his early childish aspirations after greatness.
The wife of a simple avocat in a small Mediterranean island, she lived to see four out of her five sons crowned as kings, and two of her daughters become princesses. But she lived, too, to see those kings dethroned and disgraced, to see the greatest of them dying slowly with a broken heart; and herself to close her eyes on a foreign shore, exiled and sad of heart, driven out from her own country, and repudiated by the very town in which her son was born. If ever any woman had cause to learn the sad meaning of the oft-repeated adage, "Sic transit gloria mundi," it was Madame Mère in her prolonged old age at Rome, where, though still surrounded by loving and admiring friends, the beautiful old lady must often have looked back with a sore heart to the cosy house at Ajaccio, in which, years ago, she and Carlo Buonaparte ruled over their numerous family of sons and daughters, little dreaming of slippery sceptres, or of the unsubstantial greatness of conquest.
The reception-room windows opened out upon a paved and enclosed terrace, surrounded by flowers. Here Napoleon and his four brothers used often to play, peeping through the balustrade upon the sunny street below; and here the old concierge picked us each a spray or two of scented geranium that was said to have been growing there ever since his time.
A little bedroom on this storey is shown as the one in which the great man was born, and here is still the small iron bedstead always used by madame.