Sampiero being also about this time incapacitated by a severe wound, he defeated the Corsicans in the battle of Morosaglia. This defeat, however, quickly brought the sick hero from his bed, again to turn the fate of war; and for five years the contest continued with varying success.
Then followed a cruel stroke to the poor deluded islanders, who had fancied that France was for ever to be their protector and ally. The king of France, tired of war, and ungenerously forgetful of former promises, concluded a treaty with his continental enemies, by which he again surrendered Corsica to her old tyrant Genoa. Decimated and discouraged, the Corsicans saw their six years of bloodshed and impoverishment wasted by the political selfishness of their stronger neighbours, and the independence for which they had so willingly laid down life, and laid desolate home, toyed with as a plaything, and bartered by the monarch in whose good faith they had trusted.
But, if their power of resistance was not crushed, much less was Sampiero's. Throwing up his old employment, he now travelled from court to court, seeking assistance for his beloved country in this her last and most treacherous stroke of fortune.
Whilst engaged in this occupation, a terrible domestic calamity suddenly reached his ears—a calamity which, to his half-savage, wholly-noble mind, engrossed with love of country and a passion for that country's freedom, seemed the cruellest and basest disgrace that had ever befallen a man.
His wife Vannina, who had not lived much, in these troublous times, with her stern and warlike husband, was now residing with her two boys at Marseilles, under French protection. The Genoese, hoping to injure Sampiero through her weakness, surrounded the lonely woman by friendly seeming spies, who at length persuaded her credulous nature that the cause of her husband was one useless to his country, prejudicial to his own interests, and that it was the duty of a true wife to dissuade, rather than to abet this madman in his lawless endeavours.
Sampiero was in Algiers seeking the assistance of the celebrated Barbarossa, when news was brought him that Vannina was about to escape to Genoa.
Scarcely able to credit the terrible idea that his own wife could desert the cause that to him was more sacred than life, he yet refused to leave the work on which he was engaged, and sent a friend instead to Marseilles to follow and intercept the fugitive.
Vannina was overtaken at Antibes, and took refuge in the bishop's house.
The prelate, however, afraid perhaps of Sampiero, soon ejected the miserable woman, who proceeded to Aix. The Parliament there offered her its protection.
But Vannina, though weak, was of Corsican blood, and sprung from a race of heroes, and she refused to be protected from her husband. "I have sinned," she said, sadly; "I am his wife; let him do to me what he pleases."