Resistance to France having been crushed, the policy of conciliation inaugurated, and the Corsicans encouraged to take part in the management of their own affairs, subject to France, one might hesitate before condemning the course of Charles Bonaparte in Corsica, just as we may hesitate between the policies of Kossuth and Déak in Hungary, or of Kosciusko and Czartoryski in Poland. We may, and do, admire the patriot who resists to the death; and, at the same time, respect the citizen who fights till conquered, and then makes the best of a bad situation.
In 1765 Madame Letitia Bonaparte gave birth to her first child; in 1767, to her second, both of whom died while infants. In 1768 was born Joseph, and on August 15, 1769, Napoleon.[1]
[1] During the period of this pregnancy, Corsica was in the storm of war; and Madame Bonaparte, following her husband, was in the midst of the sufferings, terrors, and brutalities which such a war creates. The air was still electrical with the hot passions of deadly strife when the young wife’s time came. On the 15th of August, 1769, Madame Bonaparte, a devout Catholic, attended service at the church; but feeling labor approaching, hastened home, and was barely able to reach her room before she was delivered of Napoleon on a rug upon the floor.
The authority for this statement is Madame Bonaparte herself, who gave that account of the matter to the Permons in Paris, on the 18th of Brumaire, the day on which the son thus born was struggling for supreme power in France.
The story which represents the greatest of men and warriors as having come into the world upon a piece of carpet, or tapestry, upon which the heroes of the “Iliad” were represented, is a fable, according to the express statement made by Madame Bonaparte to the American General Lee, in Rome, in 1830.
Other children came to the Bonapartes in the years following, the survivors of these being: Elisa, Lucien, Louis, Pauline, Caroline, and Jerome. To support this large family, and to live in the hospitable fashion which custom required of a man of his rank, Charles Bonaparte found a difficult matter, especially as he was a pleasure-loving, extravagant man whose idea of work seemed to be that of a born courtier. He returned to Italy after the peace; spent much of his patrimony there; made the reputation of a sociable, intelligent, easy-going gentleman; and took his degree of Doctor of Laws, at Pisa, in November, 1769.
It was his misfortune to be cumbered with a mortgaged estate and a hereditary lawsuit. Whatever surplus the mortgage failed to devour was swallowed by the lawsuit. His father had expensively chased this rainbow, pushed this hopeless attempt to get justice; and the steps of the father were followed by the son. It was the old story of a sinner, sick and therefore repentant; a priest holding the keys to heaven and requiring payment in advance; a craven surrender of estate to purchase the promise of salvation. Thus the Jesuits got Bonaparte houses and lands, in violation of the terms of an ancestor’s will, the lawsuit being the effort of the legal heirs to make good the testament of the original owner.
In spite of all they could do, the Bonapartes were never able to recover the property.
Charles Bonaparte, a man of handsome face and figure, seems to have had a talent for making friends, for he was made assessor to the highest court of Ajaccio, a member of the council of Corsican nobles, and later, the representative of these nobles to France. With the slender income from his wife’s estate and that from his own, aided by his official earnings, he maintained his family fairly well; but his pretensions and expenditures were so far beyond what he was really able to afford that, financially, he was never at ease.
It was the familiar misery of the gentleman who strives to gratify a rich man’s tastes with a poor man’s purse. There was his large stone mansion, his landed estate, his aristocratic associates, his patent of nobility signed by the Duke of Florence; and yet there was not enough money in the house to school the children.