I have had a great escape. If I had not taken the route I did take, and had come direct from Marseille, I should have encountered a dreadful tempest which wrecked three ships on the coast.
Ajaccio, April 2.
This evening, at ten o'clock, a little boat will carry me away; then I have five days' quarantine at Alghiero, a little harbour you may see on the map of Sardinia. It is there, between Alghiero and Sassari, that the district of Argentara lies, and it is there that I am going to see mines, abandoned at the time of the discovery of America. I cannot tell you more than that.
When this letter is in your possession in that pretty room at beautiful Wierzchownia, I shall be either a fool or a man of wisdom; perhaps neither the one nor the other, simply an ambitious heart defeated in an ingenious hope.
Addio, cara; I hope that all goes well at Wierzchownia, that you have wept a little over "César Birotteau," that you have written me your feelings and impressions about that book, and that I shall thus be rewarded for it in this world. All caressing things to those you love. I have again put off writing to M. Hanski, because I shall do so at Milan after receiving certain news. But give him my regards, and keep for yourself the most attaching and coquettish, which are your due.
Off Alghiero, Sardinia, April 8.
I am here, after five days of rather lucky navigation in a coral-boat on its way to Africa. But I now know the privations of sailors; we had nothing to eat but the fish we caught, which they boiled into execrable soup. I had to sleep on deck and be devoured by fleas, which abound, they say, in Sardinia. And finally, although here, we are condemned to remain five days in quarantine on this little boat, in view of port, and those savages will give us nothing. We have just gone through a frightful tempest; they would not let us fasten a cable to a ring on the quay; but, as we are Frenchmen, one sailor jumped into the water and fastened it himself by force. The governor came down and ordered the cable loosed as soon as the sea calmed down; which, under their system of contagion, was absurd; because we had already given the cholera or we had not given it. It was a pure notion of the governor, who wants things done as he says. Africa begins here; I see a ragged population, almost naked, brown as Ethiopians.
Cagliari, April 17.
I have just crossed the whole of Sardinia and seen things such as they relate of the Hurons and about Polynesia. A desert kingdom, real savages, no husbandry; long stretches of palm-trees and cactus; goats everywhere browsing on the undergrowth and keeping it down to the level of the waist. I have been seventeen and eighteen hours on horseback—I who have not mounted a horse these four years—without seeing a single dwelling. I came through a virgin forest, lying on the neck of my horse in fear of my life; for I had to ride down water-courses arched over with branches and climbing plants which threatened to put out my eyes, break my teeth or wrench off my head. Gigantic oaks, cork-trees, laurel, and heather thirty feet high,—nothing to eat.