Some miles to the southwards of Bastia, on the heights of
the east coast, lies Vescovato, a spot celebrated in Corsican
history. Leaving the coast-road at the tower of Buttafuoco,
you turn upwards into the hills, the way leading through
magnificent forests of chestnuts, which cover the heights on
every side. The general name for this beautiful little district
is Casinca; and the region round Vescovato is honoured with
the special appellation of Castagniccia, or the land of chestnuts.
I was curious to see this Corsican paese, in which Count
Matteo Buttafuoco once offered Rousseau an asylum; I expected
to find a village such as I had already seen frequently
enough among the mountains. I was astonished, therefore,
when I saw Vescovato before me, lost in the green hills
among magnificent groves of chestnuts, oranges, vines, fruit-trees
of every kind, a mountain brook gushing down through
it, the houses of primitive Corsican cast, yet here and there
not without indications of architectural taste. I now could
not but own to myself that of all the retreats that a misanthropic
philosopher might select, the worst was by no means
Vescovato. It is a mountain hermitage, in the greenest,
shadiest solitude, with the loveliest walks, where you can
dream undisturbed, now among the rocks by the wild stream,
now under a blossom-laden bush of erica beside an ivy-hung
cloister, or you are on the brow of a hill from which the eye
looks down upon the plain of the Golo, rich and beautiful as
a nook of paradise, and upon the sea.
A bishop built the place; and the bishops of the old town
of Mariana, which lay below in the plain, latterly lived here.
Historic names and associations cluster thickly round Vescovato;
especially is it honoured by its connexion with three
Corsican historians of the sixteenth century—Ceccaldi, Monteggiani,
and Filippini. Their memory is still as fresh as
their houses are well preserved. The Curato of the place
conducted me to Filippini's house, a mean peasant's cottage.
I could not repress a smile when I was shown a stone taken
from the wall, on which the most celebrated of the Corsican
historians had in the fulness of his heart engraved the
following inscription:—Has Ædes ad suum et amicorum
usum in commodiorem Formam redegit anno MDLXXV., cal. Decemb.
A. Petrus Philippinus Archid. Marian. In sooth, the
pretensions of these worthy men were extremely humble.
Another stone exhibits Filippini's coat of arms—his house,
with a horse tied to a tree. It was the custom of the archdeacon
to write his history in his vineyard, which they still
show in Vescovato. After riding up from Mariana, he fastened
his horse under a pine, and sat down to meditate or to write,
protected by the high walls of his garden—for his life was
in constant danger from the balls of his enemies. He thus
wrote the history of the Corsicans under impressions highly
exciting and dramatic.
Filippini's book is the leading work on Corsican history,
and is of a thoroughly national character. The Corsicans may
well be proud of it. It is an organic growth from the popular
mind of the country; songs, traditions, chronicles, and,
latterly, professed and conscious historical writing, go to constitute
the work as it now lies before us. The first who
wrought upon it was Giovanni della Grossa, lieutenant and
secretary of the brave Vincentello d'Istria. He collected the
old legends and traditions, and proceeded as Paul Diaconus
did in his history. He brought down the history of Corsica
to the year 1464. His scholar, Monteggiani, continued it to
the year 1525,—but this part of the history is meagre; then
came Ceccaldi, who continued it to the year 1559; and Filippini,
who brought it as far as 1594. Of the thirteen books
composing the whole, he has, therefore, written only the last
four; but he edited and gave form to the entire work, so that
it now bears his name. The editio princeps appeared in
Tournon in France, in 1594, in Italian, under the following
title:—
"The History of Corsica, in which all things are recorded
that have happened from the time that it began to be inhabited
up till the year 1594. With a general description of the entire
Island; divided into thirteen books, and commenced by Giovanni
della Grossa, who wrote the first nine thereof, which
were continued by Pier Antonio Monteggiani, and afterwards
by Marc' Antonio Ceccaldi, and were collected and enlarged
by the Very Reverend Antonpietro Filippini, Archidiaconus of
Mariana, the last four being composed by himself. Diligently
revised and given to the light by the same Archidiaconus. In
Tournon. In the printing-house of Claudio Michael, Printer
to the University, 1594."
Although an opponent of Sampiero, and though, from
timidity, or from deliberate intent to falsify, frequently guilty
of suppressing or perverting facts, he, nevertheless, told the
Genoese so many bitter truths in his book, that the Republic
did everything in its power to prevent its circulation.
It had become extremely scarce when Pozzo di Borgo did his
country the signal service of having it edited anew. The
learned Corsican, Gregori, was the new editor, and he furnished
the work with an excellent introduction; it appeared, as
edited by Gregori, at Pisa, in the year 1827, in five volumes.
The Corsicans are certainly worthy to have the documentary
monuments of their history well attended to. Their modern
historians blame Filippini severely for incorporating in his
history all the traditions and fables of Grossa. For my part,
I have nothing but praise to give him for this; his history
must not be judged according to strict scientific rules; it
possesses, as we have it, the high value of bearing the undisguised
impress of the popular mind. I have equally little sympathy
with the fault-finders in their depreciation of Filippini's
talent. He is somewhat prolix, but his vein is rich; and a
sound philosophic morality, based on accurate observation of life,
pervades his writings. The man is to be held in honour; he
has done his people justice, though no adherent of the popular
cause, but a partisan of Genoa. Without Filippini, a great
part of Corsican history would by this time have been buried
in obscurity. He dedicated his work to Alfonso d'Ornano,
Sampiero's son, in token of his satisfaction at the young
hero's reconciling himself to Genoa, and even visiting that
city.
"When I undertook to write the History," he says, "I trusted
more to the gifts which I enjoy from nature, than to that acquired
skill and polish which is expected in those who make
similar attempts. I thought to myself that I should stand excused
in the eyes of those who should read me, if they considered
how great the want of all provision for such an undertaking is
in this island (in which I must live, since it has pleased God
to cast my lot here); so that scientific pursuits, of whatever
kind, are totally impossible, not to speak of writing a pure and
quite faultless style." There are other passages in Filippini,
in which he complains with equal bitterness of the ignorance
of the Corsicans, and their total want of cultivation in
any shape. He does not even except the clergy, "among
whom," says he, "there are hardly a dozen who have learned
grammar; while among the Franciscans, although they have
five-and-twenty convents, there are scarcely so many as eight
lettered men; and thus the whole nation grows up in ignorance."
He never conceals the faults of his countrymen. "Besides
their ignorance," he remarks, "one can find no words to express
the laziness of the islanders where the tilling of the
ground is concerned. Even the fairest plain in the world—the
plain that extends from Aleria to Mariana—lies desolate;
and they will not so much as drive away the fowls. But
when it chances that they have become masters of a single
carlino, they imagine that it is impossible now that they can
ever want, and so sink into complete idleness."—This is a
strikingly apt characterization of the Corsicans of the present
day. "Why does no one prop the numberless wild oleasters?"
asks Filippini; "why not the chestnuts? But they do nothing,
and therefore are they all poor. Poverty leads to
crime; and daily we hear of robberies. They also swear false
oaths. Their feuds and their hatred, their little love and
their little faithfulness, are quite endless; hence that proverb
is true which we are wont to hear: 'The Corsican never
forgives.' And hence arises all that calumniating, and all
that backbiting, that we see perpetually. The people of
Corsica (as Braccellio has written) are, beyond other nations,
rebellious, and given to change; many are addicted to a certain
superstition which they call Magonie, and thereto they
use the men as women. There prevails here also a kind of
soothsaying, which they practise with the shoulder-bones of
dead animals."
Such is the dark side of the picture which the Corsican
historian draws of his countrymen; and he here spares them
so little, that, in fact, he merely reproduces what Seneca is
said to have written of them in the lines—
"Prima est ulcisi lex, altera vivere raptu,
Tertia mentiri, quarta negare Deos."
On the other hand, in the dedication to Alfonso, he defends
most zealously the virtues of his people against Tomaso
Porcacchi Aretino da Castiglione, who had attacked them in
his "Description of the most famous Islands of the World."
"This man," says Filippini, "speaks of the Corsicans as
assassins, which makes me wonder at him with no small
astonishment, for there will be found, I may well venture to
say, no people in the world among whom strangers are more
lovingly handled, and among whom they can travel with
more safety; for throughout all Corsica they meet with the
utmost hospitality and courteousness, without having ever to
expend the smallest coin for their maintenance." This is
true; a stranger here corroborates the Corsican historian,
after a lapse of three hundred years.
As in Vescovato we are standing on the sacred ground of
Corsican historiography, I may mention a few more of the
Corsican historians. An insular people, with a past so rich
in striking events, heroic struggles, and great men, and characterized
by a patriotism so unparalleled, might also be expected
to be rich in writers of the class referred to; and
certainly their numbers, as compared with the small population,
are astonishing. I give only the more prominent
names.
Next to Filippini, the most note-worthy of the Corsican
historiographers is Petrus Cyrnæus, Archdeacon of Aleria,
the other ancient Roman colony. He lived in the fifteenth
century, and wrote, besides his Commentarium de Bello Ferrariensi,
a History of Corsica extending down to the year
1482, in Latin, with the title, Petri Cyrnæi de rebus Corsicis
libri quatuor. His Latin is as classical as that of the best
authors of his time; breadth and vigour characterize his style,
which has a resemblance to that of Sallust or Tacitus; but
his treatment of his materials is thoroughly unartistic. He
dwells longest on the siege of Bonifazio by Alfonso of Arragon,
and on the incidents of his own life. Filippini did not know,
and therefore could not use the work of Cyrnæus; it existed
only in manuscript till brought to light from the library of
Louis XV., and incorporated in Muratori's large work in the
year 1738. The excellent edition (Paris, 1834) which we
now possess we owe to the munificence of Pozzo di Borgo,
and the literary ability of Gregori, who has added an Italian
translation of the Latin text.
This author's estimate of the Corsicans is still more characteristic
and intelligent than that of Filippini. Let us hear
what he has to say, that we may see whether the present
Corsicans have retained much or little of the nature of their
forefathers who lived in those early times:—
"They are eager to avenge an injury, and it is reckoned
disgraceful not to take vengeance. When they cannot reach
him who has done the murder, then they punish one of his
relations. On this account, as soon as a murder has taken
place, all the relatives of the murderer instantly arm themselves
in their own defence. Only children and women are
spared." He describes the arms of the Corsicans of his time
as follows: "They wear pointed helms, called cerbelleras;
others also round ones; further daggers, spears four ells long,
of which each man has two. On the left side rests the sword,
on the right the dagger.
"In their own country, they are at discord; out of it,
they hold fast to each other. Their souls are ready for
death (animi ad mortem parati). They are universally
poor, and despise trade. They are greedy of renown;
gold and silver they scarcely use at all. Drunkenness they
think a great disgrace. They seldom learn to read and
write; few of them hear the orators or the poets; but in disputation
they exercise themselves so continually, that when a
cause has to be decided, you would think them all very admirable
pleaders. Among the Corsicans, I never saw a head
that was bald. The Corsicans are of all men the most hospitable.
Their own wives cook their victuals for the highest
men in the land. They are by nature inclined to silence—made
rather for acting than for speaking. They are also
the most religious of mortals.
"It is the custom to separate the men from the women,
more especially at table. The wives and daughters fetch the
water from the well; for the Corsicans have almost no menials.
The Corsican women are industrious: you may see them, as
they go to the fountain, bearing the pitcher on their head,
leading the horse, if they have one, by a halter over their
arm, and at the same time turning the spindle. They are
also very chaste, and are not long sleepers.
"The Corsicans inter their dead expensively; for they
bury them not without exequies, without laments, without
panegyric, without dirges, without prayer. For their funeral
solemnities are very similar to those of the Romans. One of
the neighbours raises the cry, and calls to the nearest village:
'Ho there! cry to the other village, for such a one is just
dead.' Then they assemble according to their villages,
their towns, and their communities, walking one by one in a
long line—first the men and then the women. When these
arrive, all raise a great wailing, and the wife and brothers
tear the clothes upon their breast. The women, disfigured
with weeping, smite themselves on the bosom, lacerate the
face, and tear out the hair.—All Corsicans are free."
The reader will have found that this picture of the Corsicans
resembles in many points the description Tacitus gives
us of the ancient Germans.
Corsican historiography has at no time flourished more than
during the heroic fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; it was
silent during the seventeenth, because at that period the
entire people lay in a state of death-like exhaustion; in the
eighteenth, participating in the renewed vitality of the age,
it again became active, and we have Natali's treatise Disinganno
sulla guerra di Corsica, and Salvini's Giustificazione
dell' Insurrezione—useful books, but of no great literary
merit.
Dr. Limperani wrote a History of Corsica to the end of the
seventeenth century, a work full of valuable materials, but
prosy and long-winded. Very serviceable—in fact, from the
documents it contains, indispensable—is the History of the
Corsicans, by Cambiaggi, in four quarto volumes. Cambiaggi
dedicated his work to Frederick the Great, the admirer of
Pasquale Paoli and Corsican heroism.
Now that the Corsican people have lost their freedom, the
learned patriots of Corsica—and Filippini would no longer
have to complain of the dearth of literary cultivation among his
countrymen—have devoted themselves with praiseworthy zeal
to the history of their country. These men are generally advocates.
We have, for example, Pompei's book, L'Etat actuel
de la Corse; Gregori edited Filippini and Peter Cyrnæus,
and made a collection of the Corsican Statutes—a highly
meritorious work. These laws originated in the old traditionary
jurisprudence of the Corsicans, which the democracy
of Sampiero adopted, giving it a more definite and comprehensive
form. They underwent further additions and improvements
during the supremacy of the Genoese, who finally,
in the sixteenth century, collected them into a code. They
had become extremely scarce. The new edition is a splendid
monument of Corsican history, and the codex itself does the
Genoese much credit. Renucci, another talented Corsican,
has written a Storia di Corsica, in two volumes, published at
Bastia in 1833, which gives an abridgment of the earlier history,
and a detailed account of events during the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, up to 1830. The work is rich in
material, but as a historical composition feeble. Arrighi wrote
biographies of Sampiero and Pasquale Paoli. Jacobi's work
in two volumes is the History of Corsica in most general use.
It extends down to the end of the war of independence under
Paoli, and is to be completed in a third volume. Jacobi's
merit consists in having written a systematically developed
history of the Corsicans, using all the available sources; his
book is indispensable, but defective in critical acumen, and
far from sufficiently objective. The latest book on Corsican
history, is an excellent little compendium by Camillo Friess,
keeper of the Archives in Ajaccio, who told me he proposed
writing at greater length on the same subject. He has my best
wishes for the success of such an undertaking, for he is a man of
original and vigorous intellect. It is to be hoped he will not,
like Jacobi, write his work in French, but, as he is bound in
duty to his people, in Italian.
I did not neglect to visit the house of Count Matteo Buttafuoco,
which was at one time to have been the domicile of
Rousseau. It is a structure of considerable pretensions, the
stateliest in Vescovato. Part of it is at present occupied by
Marshal Sebastiani, whose family belongs to the neighbouring
village of Porta.
This Count Buttafuoco is the same man against whom
Napoleon wrote an energetic pamphlet, when a fiery young
democrat in Ajaccio. The Count was an officer in the French
army when he invited Jean Jacques Rousseau to Vescovato.
The philosopher of Geneva had, in his Contrat Social, written
and prophesied as follows with regard to Corsica: "There is
still one country in Europe susceptible of legislation—the island
of Corsica. The vigour and perseverance displayed by the
Corsicans, in gaining and defending their freedom, are such
as entitle them to claim the aid of some wise man to teach
them how to preserve it. I have an idea that this little island
will one day astonish Europe." When the French were sending
out their last and decisive expedition against Corsica,
Rousseau wrote: "It must be confessed that your French
are a very servile race, a people easily bought by despotism,
and shamefully cruel to the unfortunate; if they knew of a
free man at the other end of the world, I believe they would
march all the way thither, for the mere pleasure of exterminating
him."
I shall not affirm that this was a second prophecy of Rousseau's,
but the first has certainly been fulfilled, for the day
has come in which the Corsicans have astonished Europe.
The favourable opinion of the Corsican people, thus expressed
by Rousseau, induced Paoli to invite him to Corsica in 1764,
that he might escape from the persecution of his enemies in
Switzerland. Voltaire, always enviously and derisively inclined
towards Rousseau, had spread the malicious report that
this offer of an asylum in Corsica was merely a ridiculous
trick some one was playing on him. Upon this, Paoli had
himself written the invitation. Buttafuoco had gone further;
he had called upon the philosopher—of whom the Poles also
begged a constitution—to compose a code of laws for the
Corsicans. Paoli does not seem to have opposed the scheme,
perhaps because he considered such a work, though useless for
its intended purpose, still as, in one point of view, likely to increase
the reputation of the Corsicans. The vain misanthrope
thus saw himself in the flattering position of a Pythagoras,
and joyfully wrote, in answer, that the simple idea of occupying
himself with such a task elevated and inspired his soul;
and that he should consider the remainder of his unhappy days
nobly and virtuously spent, if he could spend them to the
advantage of the brave Corsicans. He now, with all seriousness,
asked for materials. The endless petty annoyances in
which he was involved, prevented him ever producing the
work. But what would have been its value if he had? What
were the Corsicans to do with a theory, when they had already
given themselves a constitution of practical efficiency, thoroughly
popular, because formed on the material basis of their
traditions and necessities?
Circumstances prevented Rousseau's going to Corsica—pity!
He might have made trial of his theories there—for
the island seems the realized Utopia of his views of that normal
condition of society which he so lauds in his treatise on
the question—Whether or not the arts and sciences have been
beneficial to the human race? In Corsica, he would have
had what he wanted, in plenty—primitive mortals in woollen
blouses, living on goat's-milk and a few chestnuts, neither
science nor art—equality, bravery, hospitality—and revenge
to the death! I believe the warlike Corsicans would have
laughed heartily to have seen Rousseau wandering about
under the chestnuts, with his cat on his arm, or plaiting
his basket-work. But Vendetta! vendetta! bawled once or
twice, with a few shots of the fusil, would very soon have
frightened poor Jacques away again. Nevertheless Rousseau's
connexion with Corsica is memorable, and stands in intimate
relation with the most characteristic features of his history.
In the letter in which he notifies to Count Buttafuoco his
inability to accept his invitation, Rousseau writes: "I have
not lost the sincere desire of living in your country; but the
complete exhaustion of my energies, the anxieties I should
incur, and the fatigues I should undergo, with other hindrances
arising from my position, compel me, at least for the present,
to relinquish my resolution; though, notwithstanding these
difficulties, I find I cannot reconcile myself to the thought of
utterly abandoning it. I am growing old; I am growing
frail; my powers are leaving me; my wishes tempt me on,
and yet my hopes grow dim. Whatever the issue may be,
receive, and render to Signor Paoli, my liveliest, my heartfelt
thanks, for the asylum which he has done me the honour
to offer me. Brave and hospitable people! I shall never
forget it so long as I live, that your hearts, your arms, were
opened to me, at a time when there was hardly another asylum
left for me in Europe. If it should not be my good fortune
to leave my ashes in your island, I shall at least endeavour
to leave there a monument of my gratitude; and I shall do
myself honour, in the eyes of the whole world, when I call
you my hosts and protectors. What I hereby promise to you,
and what you may henceforth rely on, is this, that I shall
occupy the rest of my life only with myself or with Corsica;
all other interests are completely banished from my soul."
The concluding words promise largely; but they are in
Rousseau's usual glowing and rhetorical vein. How singularly
such a style, and the entire Rousseau nature, contrast
with the austere taciturnity, the manly vigour, the wild and
impetuous energy of the Corsican! Rousseau and Corsican
seem ideas standing at an infinite distance apart—natures the
very antipodes of each other, and yet they touch each other
like corporeal and incorporeal, united in time and thought.
It is strange to hear, amid the prophetic dreams of a universal
democracy predicted by Rousseau, the wild clanging of that
Corybantian war-dance of the Corsicans under Paoli, proclaiming
the new era which their heroic struggle began. It is as
if they would deafen, with the clangour of their arms, the
old despotic gods, while the new divinity is being born upon
their island, Jupiter—Napoleon, the revolutionary god of the
iron age.
The Corsicans, like other brave peoples of fiery and imaginative
temperament, have a war-dance, called the Moresca. Its
origin is matter of dispute—some asserting it to be Moorish
and others Greek. The Greeks called these dances of warlike
youths, armed with sword and shield, Pyrrhic dances;
and ascribed their invention to Minerva, and Pyrrhus, the
son of Achilles. It is uncertain how they spread themselves
over the more western countries; but, ever since the
struggles of the Christians and Moors, they have been called
Moresca; and it appears that they are everywhere practised
where the people are rich in traditions of that old
gigantic, world-historical contest between Christian and Pagan,
Europe and Asia,—as among the Albanians in Greece,
among the Servians, the Montenegrins, the Spaniards, and
other nations.
I do not know what significance is elsewhere attached to
the Moresca, as I have only once, in Genoa, witnessed this
magnificent dance; but in Corsica it has all along preserved
peculiarities attaching to the period of the Crusades, the Moresca
there always representing a conflict between Saracens
and Christians; the deliverance of Jerusalem, perhaps, or the
conquest of Granada, or the taking of the Corsican cities
Aleria and Mariana, by Hugo Count Colonna. The Moresca
has thus assumed a half religious, half profane character, and
has received from its historical relations a distinctive and
national impress.
The Corsicans have at all times produced the spectacle of
this dance, particularly in times of popular excitement and
struggle, when a national armed sport of this kind was likely
of itself to inflame the beholders, while at the same time it
reminded them of the great deeds of their forefathers. I know
of no nobler pleasure for a free and manly people, than the
spectacle of the Moresca, the flower and poetry of the mood
that prompts to and exults in fight. It is the only national
drama the Corsicans have; as they were without other amusement,
they had the heroic deeds of their ancestors represented
to them in dance, on the same soil that they had steeped in
their blood. It might frequently happen that they rose from
the Moresca to rush into battle.
Vescovato, as Filippini mentions, was often the theatre of
the Moresca. The people still remember that it was danced
there in honour of Sampiero; it was also produced in Vescovato
in the time of Paoli. The most recent performance is that
of the year 1817.
The representation of the conquest of Mariana, by Hugo
Colonna, was that most in favour. A village was supposed
to represent the town. The stage was a piece of open ground,
the green hills served as amphitheatre, and on their sides lay
thousands and thousands, gathered from all parts of the island.
Let the reader picture to himself such a public as this—rude,
fierce men, all in arms, grouped under the chestnuts, with look,
voice, and gesture accompanying the clanging hero-dance.
The actors, sometimes two hundred in number, are in two
separate troops; all wear the Roman toga. Each dancer
holds in his right hand a sword, in his left a dagger; the
colour of the plume and the breastplate alone distinguish
Moors from Christians. The fiddle-bow of a single violin-player
rules the Moresca.
It begins. A Moorish astrologer issues from Mariana dressed
in the caftan, and with a long white beard; he looks to the sky
and consults the heavenly luminaries, and in dismay he predicts
misfortune. With gestures of alarm he hastens back within
the gate. And see! yonder comes a Moorish messenger, headlong
terror in look and movement, rushing towards Mariana
with the news that the Christians have already taken Aleria
and Corte, and are marching on Mariana. Just as the messenger
vanishes within the city, horns blow, and enter Hugo
Colonna with the Christian army. Exulting shouts greet
him from the hills.
Hugo, Hugo, Count Colonna,
O how gloriously he dances!
Dances like the kingly tiger
Leaping o'er the desert rocks.
High his sword lifts Count Colonna,
On its hilt the cross he kisses,
Then unto his valiant warriors
Thus he speaks, the Christian knight:
On in storm for Christ and country!
Up the walls of Mariana
Dancing, lead to-day the Moorish
Infidels a dance of death!
Know that all who fall in battle,
For the good cause fighting bravely,
Shall to-day in heaven mingle
With the blessed angel-choirs.
The Christians take their position. Flourish of horns.
The Moorish king, Nugalone, and his host issue from
Mariana.
Nugalone, O how lightly,
O how gloriously he dances!
Like the tawny spotted panther,
When he dances from his lair.
With his left hand, Nugalone
Curls his moustache, dark and glossy:
Then unto his Paynim warriors
Thus he speaks, the haughty Moor:
Forward! in the name of Allah!
Dance them down, the dogs of Christians!
Show them, as we dance to victory,
Allah is the only God!
Know that all who fall in battle,
Shall to-day in Eden's garden
With the fair immortal maidens
Dance the rapturous houri-dance.
The two armies now file off—the Moorish king gives the
signal for battle, and the figures of the dance begin; there
are twelve of them.
Louder music, sharper, clearer!
Nugalone and Colonna
Onward to the charge are springing,
Onward dance their charging hosts.
Lightly to the ruling music
Youthful limbs are rising, falling,
Swaying, bending, like the flower-stalks,
To the music of the breeze.
Now they meet, now gleam the weapons,
Lightly swung, and lightly parried;
Are they swords, or are they sunbeams—
Sunbeams glittering in their hands?
Tones of viol, bolder, fuller!—
Clash and clang of crossing weapons,
Varied tramp of changing movement,
Backward, forward, fast and slow.
Now they dance in circle wheeling,
Moor and Christian intermingled;—
See, the chain of swords is broken,
And in crescents they retire!
Wilder, wilder, the Moresca—
Furious now the sounding onset,
Like the rush of mad sea-billows,
To the music of the storm.
Quit thee bravely, stout Colonna,
Drive the Paynim crew before thee;
We must win our country's freedom
In the battle-dance to-day.
Thus we'll dance down all our tyrants—
Thus we'll dance thy routed armies
Down the hills of Vescovato,
Heaven-accurséd Genoa!
—still new evolutions, till at length they dance the last
figure, called the resa, and the Saracen yields.
When I saw the Moresca in Genoa, it was being performed
in honour of the Sardinian constitution, on its anniversary
day, May the 9th; for the beautiful dance has in Italy a
revolutionary significance, and is everywhere forbidden except
where the government is liberal. The people in their picturesque
costumes, particularly the women in their long white
veils, covering the esplanade at the quay, presented a magnificent
spectacle. About thirty young men, all in a white
dress fitting tightly to the body; one party with green, the
other with red scarfs round the waist, danced the Moresca to
an accompaniment of horns and trumpets. They all had
rapiers in each hand; and as they danced the various movements,
they struck the weapons against each other. This
Moresca appeared to have no historical reference.
The Corsicans, like the Spaniards, have also preserved the
old theatrical representations of the sufferings of our Saviour;
they are now, however, seldom given. In the year 1808, a
spectacle of this kind was produced in Orezza, before ten thousand
people. Tents represented the houses of Pilate, Herod,
and Caiaphas. There were angels, and there were devils who
ascended through a trap-door. Pilate's wife was a young
fellow of twenty-three, with a coal-black beard. The commander
of the Roman soldiery wore the uniform of the French
national guards, with a colonel's epaulettes of gold and silver;
the officer second in command wore an infantry uniform, and
both had the cross of the Legion of Honour on their breast.
A priest, the curato of Carcheto, played the part of Judas. As
the piece was commencing, a disturbance arose from some
unknown cause among the spectators, who bombarded each
other with pieces of rock, with which they supplied themselves
from the natural amphitheatre.
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"Espada nunca vencida!
Esfuerço de esfuerço estava."—Romanza Durandarte.
There is still a third very remarkable house in Vescovato—the
house of the Ceccaldi family, from which two illustrious
Corsicans have sprung; the historian already mentioned, and
the brave General Andrew Colonna Ceccaldi, in his day one
of the leading patriots of Corsica, and Triumvir along with
Giafferi and Hyacinth Paoli.
But the house has other associations of still greater interest.
It is the house of General Franceschetti, or rather of his
wife Catharina Ceccaldi, and it was here that the unfortunate
King Joachim Murat was hospitably received when he landed
in Corsica on his flight from Provence; and here that he
formed the plan for re-conquering his beautiful realm of
Naples, by a chivalrous coup de main.
Once more, therefore, the history of a bold caballero passes
in review before us on this strange enchanted island, where
kings' crowns hang upon the trees, like golden apples in the
Gardens of the Hesperides.
Murat's end is more touching than that of almost any other
of those men who have careered for a while with meteoric
splendour through the world, and then had a sudden and
lamentable fall.
After his last rash and ill-conducted war in Italy, Murat
had sought refuge in France. In peril of his life, wandering
about in the vineyards and woods, he concealed himself for
some time in the vicinity of Toulon; to an old grenadier he
owed his rescue from death by hunger. The same Marquis
of Rivière who had so generously protected Murat after the
conspiracy of George Cadoudal and Pichegru, sent out soldiers
after the fugitive, with orders to take him, alive or dead. In
this frightful extremity, Joachim resolved to claim hospitality
in the neighbouring island of Corsica. He hoped to find protection
among a noble people, in whose eyes the person of a
guest is sacred.
He accordingly left his lurking-place, reached the shore in
safety, and obtained a vessel which, braving a fearful storm
and imminent danger of wreck, brought him safely to Corsica.
He landed at Bastia on the 25th of August 1815, and hearing
that General Franceschetti, who had formerly served in his
guard at Naples, was at that time in Vescovato, he immediately
proceeded thither. He knocked at the door of the
house of the Maire Colonna Ceccaldi, father-in-law of the
general, and asked to see the latter. In the Mémoires he has
written on Murat's residence in Corsica, and his attempt on
Naples, Franceschetti says:—"A man presents himself to me
muffled in a cloak, his head buried in a cap of black silk,
with a bushy beard, in pantaloons, in the gaiters and shoes of
a common soldier, haggard with privation and anxiety. What
was my amazement to detect under this coarse and common
disguise King Joachim—a prince but lately the centre of such
a brilliant court! A cry of astonishment escapes me, and I
fall at his knees."
The news that the King of Naples had landed occasioned
some excitement in Bastia, and many Corsican officers hastened
to Vescovato to offer him their services. The commandant
of Bastia, Colonel Verrière, became alarmed. He sent an
officer with a detachment of gendarmes to Vescovato, with
orders to make themselves masters of Joachim's person. But
the people of Vescovato instantly ran to arms, and prepared
to defend the sacred laws of hospitality and their guest. The
troop of gendarmes returned without accomplishing their object.
When the report spread that King Murat had appealed
to the hospitality of the Corsicans, and that his person was
threatened, the people flocked in arms from all the villages in
the neighbourhood, and formed a camp at Vescovato for the
protection of their guest, so that on the following day Murat
saw himself at the head of a small army. Poor Joachim
was enchanted with the evvivas of the Corsicans. It rested
entirely with himself whether he should assume the crown of
Corsica, but he thought only of his beautiful Naples. The
sight of a huzzaing crowd made him once more feel like a
king. "And if these Corsicans," said he, "who owe me nothing
in the world, exhibit such generous kindness, how will
my Neapolitans receive me, on whom I have conferred so
many benefits?"
His determination to regain Naples became immoveably
firm; the fate of Napoleon, after leaving the neighbouring
Elba, and landing as adventurer on the coast of France, did
not deter him. The son of fortune was resolved to try his last
throw, and play for a kingdom or death.
Great numbers of officers and gentlemen meanwhile visited
the house of the Ceccaldi from far and near, desirous of seeing
and serving Murat. He had formed his plan. He summoned
from Elba the Baron Barbarà, one of his old officers of Marine,
a Maltese who had fled to Porto Longone, in order to take definite
measures with the advice of one who was intimately
acquainted with the Calabrian coast. He secretly despatched
a Corsican to Naples, to form connexions and procure money
there. He purchased three sailing-vessels in Bastia, which
were to take him and his followers on board at Mariana,
but it came to the ears of the French, and they laid an embargo
on them. In vain did men of prudence and insight
warn Murat to desist from the foolhardy undertaking. He
had conceived the idea—and nothing could convince him of his
mistake—that the Neapolitans were warmly attached to him,
that he only needed to set foot on the Calabrian coast, in
order to be conducted in triumph to his castle; and he was
encouraged in this belief by men who came to him from
Naples, and told him that King Ferdinand was hated there,
and that people longed for nothing so ardently as to have
Murat again for their king.
Two English officers appeared in Bastia, from Genoa; they
came to Vescovato, and made offer to King Joachim of a safe
conduct to England. But Murat indignantly refused the offer,
remembering how England had treated Napoleon.
Meanwhile his position in Vescovato became more and more
dangerous, and his generous hosts Ceccaldi and Franceschetti
were now also seriously menaced, as the Bourbonist commandant
had issued a proclamation which declared all those
who attached themselves to Joachim Murat, or received him
into their houses, enemies and traitors to their country.
Murat, therefore, concluded to leave Vescovato as soon as
possible. He still negotiated for the restoration of his sequestrated
vessels; he had recourse to Antonio Galloni, commandant
of Balagna, whose brother he had formerly loaded
with kindnesses. Galloni sent him back the answer, that he
could do nothing in the matter; that, on the contrary, he had
received orders from Verrière to march on the following day
with six hundred men to Vescovato, and take him prisoner;
that, however, out of consideration for his misfortunes, he
would wait four days, pledging himself not to molest him,
provided he left Vescovato within that time.
When Captain Moretti returned to Vescovato with this
reply, and unable to hold out any prospect of the recovery of
the vessels, Murat shed tears. "Is it possible," he cried,
"that I am so unfortunate! I purchase ships in order to
leave Corsica, and the Government seizes them; I burn with
impatience to quit the island, and find every path blocked up.
Be it so! I will send away those brave men who so generously
guard me—I will stay here alone—I will bare my
breast to Galloni, or I will find means to release myself from
the bitter and cruel fate that persecutes me"—and here he
looked at the pistols lying on the table. Franceschetti had
entered the room; with emotion he said to Murat that the
Corsicans would never suffer him to be harmed. "And I,"
replied Joachim, "cannot suffer Corsica to be endangered or
embarrassed on my account; I must be gone!"
The four days had elapsed, and Galloni showed himself
with his troops before Vescovato. But the people stood ready
to give him battle; they opened fire. Galloni withdrew; for
Murat had just left the village.
It was on the 17th of September that he left Vescovato,
accompanied by Franceschetti, and some officers and veterans,
and escorted by more than five hundred armed Corsicans. He
had resolved to go to Ajaccio and embark there. Wherever
he showed himself—in the Casinca, in Tavagna, in Moriani,
in Campoloro, and beyond the mountains, the people crowded
round him and received him with evvivas. The inhabitants
of each commune accompanied him to the boundaries of the
next. In San Pietro di Venaco, the priest Muracciole met
him with a numerous body of followers, and presented to him
a beautiful Corsican horse. In a moment Murat had leapt
upon its back, and was galloping along the road, proud and
fiery, as when, in former days of more splendid fortune, he
galloped through the streets of Milan, of Vienna, of Berlin, of
Paris, of Naples, and over so many battle-fields.
In Vivario he was entertained by the old parish priest
Pentalacci, who had already, during a period of forty years, extended
his hospitality to so many fugitives—had received, in
these eventful times, Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Corsicans,
and had once even sheltered the young Napoleon, when his
life was threatened by the Paolists. As they sat at breakfast,
Joachim asked the old man what he thought of his design
on Naples. "I am a poor parish priest," said Pentalacci,
"and understand neither war nor diplomacy; but I am inclined
to doubt whether your Majesty is likely to win a crown
now, which you could not keep formerly when you were at
the head of an army." Murat replied with animation: "I
am as certain of again winning my kingdom, as I am of holding
this handkerchief in my hand."
Joachim sent Franceschetti on before, to ascertain how
people were likely to receive him in Ajaccio,—for the relatives
of Napoleon, in that town, had taken no notice of him
since his arrival in the island; and he had, therefore, already
made up his mind to stay in Bocognano till all was ready for
the embarkation. Franceschetti, however, wrote to him, that
the citizens of Ajaccio would be overjoyed to see him within
their walls, and that they pressingly invited him to come.
On the 23d of September, at four o'clock in the afternoon,
Murat entered Ajaccio for the second time in his life; he had
entered it the first time covered with glory—an acknowledged
hero in the eyes of all the world—for it was when he landed
with Napoleon, as the latter returned from Egypt. At his
entry now the bells were rung, the people saluted him with
vivats, bonfires burned in the streets, and the houses were
illuminated. But the authorities of the city instantly quitted
it, and Napoleon's relations—the Ramolino family—also withdrew;
the Signora Paravisini alone had courage and affection
enough to remain, to embrace her relative, and to offer
him hospitality in her own house. Murat thought fit to live
in a public locanda.
The garrison of the citadel of Ajaccio was Corsican, and
therefore friendly to Joachim. The commandant shut it up
within the fortress, and declared the town in a state of siege.
Murat now made the necessary preparations for his departure;
previously to which he drew up a proclamation addressed to
the Neapolitan people, consisting of thirty-six articles; it was
printed in Ajaccio.
On the 28th of September, an English officer named Maceroni,[M]
made his appearance, and requested an audience of
Joachim. He had brought passes for him from Metternich,
signed by the latter, by Charles Stuart, and by Schwarzenberg.
They were made out in the name of Count Lipona,
under which name—an anagram of Napoli—security to his
person and an asylum in German Austria or Bohemia were
guaranteed him. Murat entertained Maceroni at table; the
conversation turned upon Napoleon's last campaign, and the
battle of Waterloo, of which Maceroni gave a circumstantial
account, praising the cool bravery of the English infantry,
whose squares the French cavalry had been unable to break.
Murat said: "Had I been there, I am certain I should have
broken them;" to which Maceroni replied: "Your Majesty
would have broken the squares of the Prussians and Austrians,
but never those of the English." Full of fire Murat cried—"And
I should have broken those of the English too: for
Europe knows that I never yet found a square, of whatever
description, that I did not break!"
Murat accepted Metternich's passes, and at first pretended
to agree to the proposal; then he said that he must go to
Naples to conquer his kingdom. Maceroni begged of him
with tears to desist while it was yet time. But the king dismissed
him.
On the same day, towards midnight, the unhappy Murat
embarked, and, as his little squadron left the harbour of
Ajaccio, several cannon-shots were fired at it from the citadel,
by order of the commandant; it was said the cannons had
only been loaded with powder. The expedition consisted of
five small vessels besides a fast-sailing felucca called the
Scorridora, under the command of Barbarà, and in these there
were in all two hundred men, inclusive of subaltern officers,
twenty-two officers, and a few sailors.
The voyage was full of disasters. Fortune—that once more
favoured Napoleon when, seven months previously, he sailed
from Elba with his six ships and eight hundred men to regain his
crown—had no smiles for Murat. It is touching to see how the
poor ex-king, his heart tossed with anxieties and doubts, hovers
hesitatingly on the Calabrian coast; how he is forsaken by
his ships, and repelled as if by the warning hand of fate from
the unfriendly shore; how he is even at one time on the point
of making sail for Trieste, and saving himself in Austria, and
yet how at last the chivalrous dreamer, his mental vision
haunted unceasingly by the deceptive semblance of a crown,
adopts the fantastic and fatal resolution of landing in Pizzo.
"Murat," said the man who told me so much of Murat's
days in Ajaccio, and who had been an eye-witness of what
passed then, "was a brilliant cavalier with very little brains."
It is true enough. He was the hero of a historical romance,
and you cannot read the story of his life without being profoundly
stirred. He sat his horse better than a throne. He
had never learnt to govern; he had only, what born kings frequently
have not, a kingly bearing, and the courage to be a king;
and he was most a king when he had ceased to be acknowledged
as such: this ci-devant waiter in his father's tavern,
Abbé, and cashiered subaltern, fronted his executioners more
regally than Louis XVI., of the house of Capet, and died not
less proudly than Charles of England, of the house of Stuart.
A servant showed me the rooms in Franceschetti's in which
Murat had lived. The walls were hung with pictures of the
battles in which he had signalized himself, such as Marengo,
Eylau, the military engagement at Aboukir, and Borodino. His
portrait caught my eye instantly. The impassioned and dreamy
eye, the brown curling hair falling down over the forehead, the
soft romantic features, the fantastic white dress, the red scarf,
were plainly Joachim's. Under the portrait I read these
words—"1815. Tradito!!! abbandonato!!! li 13 Octobre assassinato!!!"
(betrayed, forsaken; on the 13th of October,
murdered);—groanings of Franceschetti's, who had accompanied
him to Pizzo. The portrait of the General hangs
beside that of Murat, a high warlike form, with a physiognomy
of iron firmness, contrasting forcibly with the troubadour face
of Joachim. Franceschetti sacrificed his all for Murat—he
left wife and child to follow him; and although he disapproved
of the undertaking of his former king, kept by his side to the last.
An incident which was related to me, and which I also saw
mentioned in the General's Mémoires, indicates great nobility of
character, and does honour to his memory. When the rude soldiery
of Pizzo were pressing in upon Murat, threatening him
with the most brutal maltreatment, Franceschetti sprang forward
and cried, "I—I am Murat!" The stroke of a sabre
stretched him on the earth, just as Murat rushed to intercept it
by declaring who he was. All the officers and soldiers who were
taken prisoners with Murat at Pizzo were thrown into prison,
wounded or not, as it might happen. After Joachim's execution,
they and Franceschetti were taken to the citadel of Capri, where
they remained for a considerable time, in constant expectation
of death, till at length the king sent the unhoped-for order for
their release. Franceschetti returned to Corsica; but he had
scarcely landed, when he was seized by the French as guilty
of high treason, and carried away to the citadel of Marseilles.
The unfortunate man remained a prisoner in Provence for
several years, but was at length set at liberty, and allowed to
return to his family in Vescovato. His fortune had been
ruined by Murat; and this general, who had risked his life
for his king, saw himself compelled to send his wife to
Vienna to obtain from the wife of Joachim a partial re-imbursement
of his outlay, and, as the journey proved fruitless, to
enter into a protracted law-process with Caroline Murat, in
which he was nonsuited at every stage. Franceschetti died
in 1836. His two sons, retired officers, are among the most
highly respected men in Corsica, and have earned the gratitude
of their countrymen by the improvements they have introduced
in agriculture.
His wife, Catharina Ceccaldi, now far advanced in years,
still lives in the same house in which she once entertained
Murat as her guest. I found the noble old lady in one of the
upper rooms, engaged in a very homely employment, and surrounded
with pigeons, which fluttered out of the window as
I entered; a scene which made me feel instantly that the
healthy and simple nature of the Corsicans has been preserved
not only in the cottages of the peasantry, but also among the
upper classes. I thought of her brilliant youth, which she
had spent in the beautiful Naples, and at the court of
Joachim; and in the course of the conversation she herself
referred to the time when General Franceschetti, and Coletta,
who has also published a special memoir on the last days of
Murat, were in the service of the Neapolitan soldier-king.
It is pleasant to see a strong nature that has victoriously
weathered the many storms of an eventful life, and has remained
true to itself when fortune became false; and I contemplated
this venerable matron with reverence, as, talking
of the great things of the past, she carefully split the beans
for the mid-day meal of her children and grandchildren.
She spoke of the time, too, when Murat lived in the house.
"Franceschetti," she said, "made the most forcible representations
to him, and told him unreservedly that he was undertaking
an impossibility. Then Murat would say sorrowfully,
'You, too, want to leave me! Ah! my Corsicans are going
to leave me in the lurch!' We could not resist him."
Leaving Vescovato, and wandering farther into the Casinca,
I still could not cease thinking on Murat. And I could not
help connecting him with the romantic Baron Theodore von
Neuhoff, who, seventy-nine years earlier, landed on this same
coast, strangely and fantastically costumed, as it had also
been Murat's custom to appear. Theodore von Neuhoff was
the forerunner in Corsica of those men who conquered for
themselves the fairest crowns in the world. Napoleon obtained
the imperial crown, Joseph the crown of Spain, Louis
the crown of Holland, Jerome the crown of Westphalia—the
land of which Theodore King of Corsica was a native,—the
adventurer Murat secured the Norman crown of the Two
Sicilies, and Bernadotte the crown of the chivalrous Scandinavians,
the oldest knights of Europe. A hundred years
before Theodore, Cervantes had satirized, in his Sancho Panza,
the romancing practice of conferring island kingdoms in
reward for conquering prowess, and now, a hundred years
after him, the romance of Arthur and the Round Table repeats
itself here on the boundaries of Spain, in the island of
Corsica, and continues to be realized in the broad daylight of
the nineteenth century, and our own present time.
I often thought of Don Quixote and the Spanish romances
in Corsica. It seems to me as if the old knight of La Mancha
were once more riding through the world's history; in fact,
are not antique Spanish names again becoming historical,
which were previously for the world at large involved in as
much romantic obscurity as the Athenian Duke Theseus of
the Midsummer Night's Dream?
"Que todo se passa en flores
Mis amores,
Que todo se passa en flores."—Spanish Song.
Near Vescovato lies the little hamlet of Venzolasca. It is
a walk as if through paradise, over the hills to it through the
chestnut-groves. On my way I passed the forsaken Capuchin
convent of Vescovato. Lying on a beautifully-wooded height,
built of brown granite, and roofed with black slate, it looked
as grave and austere as Corsican history itself, and had a singularly
quaint and picturesque effect amid the green of the trees.
In travelling through this little "Land of Chestnuts," one
forgets all fatigues. The luxuriance of the vegetation, and
the smiling hills, the view of the plain of the Golo, and the
sea, make the heart glad; the vicinity of numerous villages
gives variety and human interest, furnishing many a group
that would delight the eye of the genre painter. I saw a
great many walled fountains, at which women and girls were
filling their round pitchers; some of them had their spindles
with them, and reminded me of what Peter of Corsica has said.
Outside Venzolasca stands a beautifully situated tomb belonging
to the Casabianca family. This is another of the
noble and influential families which Vescovato can boast.
The immediate ancestors of the present French senator Casabianca
made their name famous by their deeds of arms. Raffaello
Casabianca, commandant of Corsica in 1793, Senator,
Count, and Peer of France, died in Bastia at an advanced
age in 1826. Luzio Casabianca, Corsican deputy to the
Convention, was captain of the admiral's ship, L'Orient, in
the battle of Aboukir. After Admiral Brueys had been torn
in pieces by a shot, Casabianca took the command of the
vessel, which was on fire, the flames spreading rapidly. As
far as was possible, he took measures for saving the crew, and
refused to leave the ship. His young son Giocante, a boy of
thirteen, could not be prevailed on to leave his father's side.
The vessel was every moment expected to blow up. Clasped
in each other's arms, father and son perished in the explosion.
You can wander nowhere in Corsica without breathing an
atmosphere of heroism.
Venzolasca has a handsome church, at least interiorly. I
found people engaged in painting the choir, and they complained
to me that the person who had been engaged to
gild the wood-carving, had shamefully cheated the village, as
he had been provided with ducat-gold for the purpose, and
had run off with it. The only luxury the Corsicans allow
themselves is in the matter of church-decoration, and there
is hardly a paese in the island, however poor, which does not
take a pride in decking its little church with gay colours and
golden ornaments.
From the plateau on which the church of Venzolasca stands,
there is a magnificent view seawards, and, in the opposite direction,
you have the indescribably beautiful basin of the Castagniccia.
Few regions of Corsica have given me so much pleasure
as the hills which enclose this basin in their connexion
with the sea. The Castagniccia is an imposing amphitheatre,
mountains clothed in the richest green, and of the finest forms,
composing the sides. The chestnut-woods cover them almost
to their summit; at their foot olive-groves, with their silver
gray, contrast picturesquely with the deep green of the chestnut
foliage. Half-appearing through the trees are seen scattered
hamlets, Sorbo, Penta, Castellare, and far up among the clouds
Oreto, dark, with tall black church-towers.
The sun was westering as I ascended these hills, and the
hours of that afternoon were memorably beautiful. Again I
passed a forsaken cloister—this time, of the Franciscans. It
lay quite buried among vines, and foliage of every kind, dense,
yet not dense enough to conceal the abounding fruit. As I
passed into the court, and was entering the church of the convent,
my eye lighted on a melancholy picture of decay, which
Nature, with her luxuriance of vegetation, seemed laughingly
to veil. The graves were standing open, as if those once
buried there had rent the overlying stones, that they might
fly to heaven; skulls lay among the long green grass and
trailing plants, and the cross—the symbol of all sorrow—had
sunk amid a sea of flowers.
"To Jove belong the stranger and the hungry,
And though the gift be small, it cheers the heart."—Odyssey.
An up-hill walk of two hours between fruit-gardens, the walls
of which the beautiful wreaths of the clematis garlanded all
the way along, and then through groves of chestnuts, brought
me to Oreto.
The name is derived from the Greek oros, which means
mountain; the place lies high and picturesque, on the summit
of a green hill. A huge block of granite rears its gray
head from the very centre of the village, a pedestal for the
colossal statue of a Hercules. Before reaching the paese, I had
to climb a laborious and narrow path, which at many parts
formed the channel of a brook.
At length gaining the summit, I found myself in the piazza,
or public square of the village, the largest I have seen in any
paese. It is the plateau of the mountain, overhung by other
mountains, and encircled by houses, which look like peace
itself. The village priest was walking about with his beadle,
and the paesani stood leaning in the Sabbath-stillness on their
garden walls. I stepped up to a group and asked if there was
a locanda in the place; "No," said one, "we have no locanda,
but I offer you my house—you shall have what we can give."
I gladly accepted the offer, and followed my host. Marcantonio,
before I entered his house, wished that I should take
a look of the village fountain, the pride of Oreto, and taste
the water, the best in the whole land of Casinca. Despite
my weariness, I followed the Corsican. The fountain was delicious,
and the little structure could even make pretensions to
architectural elegance. The ice-cold water streamed copiously
through five pipes from a stone temple.
Arrived in Marcantonio's house, I was welcomed by his
wife without ceremony. She bade me a good evening, and
immediately went into the kitchen to prepare the meal. My
entertainer had conducted me into his best room, and I was
astonished to find there a little store of books; they were of a
religious character, and the legacy of a relative. "I am unfortunate,"
said Marcantonio, "for I have learnt nothing, and
I am very poor; hence I must stay here upon the mountain,
instead of going to the Continent, and filling some post." I
looked more narrowly at this man in the brown blouse and
Phrygian cap. The face was reserved, furrowed with passion,
and of an iron austerity, and what he said was brief, decided,
and in a bitter tone. All the time I was in his company, I
never once saw this man smile; and found here, among the
solitary hills, an ambitious soul tormented with its thwarted
aspirations. Such minds are not uncommon in Corsica; the
frequent success of men who have emigrated from these
poor villages is a powerful temptation to others; often in
the dingiest cabin you see the family likenesses of senators,
generals, and prefects. Corsica is the land of upstarts and of
natural equality.
Marcantonio's daughter, a pretty young girl, blooming, tall,
and well-made, entered the room. Without taking any other
notice of the presence of a guest, she asked aloud, and with
complete naïveté: "Father, who is the stranger, is he a Frenchman;
what does he want in Oreto?" I told her I was a German,
which she did not understand. Giulia went to help her
mother with the meal.
This now made its appearance—the most sumptuous a poor
man could give—a soup of vegetables, and in honour of the
guest a piece of meat, bread, and peaches. The daughter set
the viands on the table, but, according to the Corsican custom,
neither she nor the mother took a share in the meal; the man
alone helped me, and ate beside me.
He took me afterwards into the little church of Oreto, and
to the edge of the rock, to show me the incomparably beautiful
view. The young curato, and no small retinue of paesani,
accompanied us. It was a sunny, golden, delightfully cool
evening. I stood wonderstruck at such undreamt-of magnificence
in scenery as the landscape presented—for at my feet
I saw the hills, with all their burden of chestnut woods, sink
towards the plain; the plain, like a boundless garden, stretch
onwards to the strand; the streams of the Golo and Fiumalto
wind through it to the glittering sea; and far on the horizon,
the islands of Capraja, Elba, and Monte Chiato. The eye
takes in the whole coast-line to Bastia, and southwards to San
Nicolao; turning inland, mountain upon mountain, crowned
with villages.
A little group had gathered round us as we stood here; and I
now began to panegyrize the island, rendered, as I said, so remarkable
by its scenery and by the history of its heroic people.
The young curate spoke in the same strain with great fire, the
peasants gesticulated their assent, and each had something to
say in praise of his country. I observed that these people
were much at home in the history of their island. The
curate excited my admiration; he had intellect, and talked
shrewdly. Speaking of Paoli, he said: "His time was a time
of action; the men of Orezza spoke little, but they did much.
Had our era produced a single individual of Paoli's large and
self-sacrificing spirit, it would be otherwise in the world than
it is. But ours is an age of chimeras and Icarus-wings, and
yet man was not made to fly." I gladly accepted the curate's
invitation to go home with him; his house was poor-looking,
built of black stone. But his little study was neat and cheerful;
and there might be between two and three hundred volumes
on the book-shelves. I spent a pleasant hour in conversation
with this cultivated, liberal, and enlightened man, over
a bottle of exquisite wine, Marcantonio sitting silent and
reserved. We happened to speak of Aleria, and I put a question
about Roman antiquities in Corsica. Marcantonio suddenly
put in his word, and said very gravely and curtly—"We
have no need of the fame of Roman antiquities—that
of our own forefathers is sufficient."
Returning to Marcantonio's house, I found in the room
both mother and daughter, and we drew in round the table
in sociable family circle. The women were mending clothes,
were talkative, unconstrained, and naïve, like all Corsicans.
The unresting activity of the Corsican women is well known.
Subordinating themselves to the men, and uncomplainingly
accepting a menial position, the whole burden of whatever
work is necessary rests upon them. They share this lot with
the women of all warlike nations; as, for example, of the
Servians and Albanians.
I described to them the great cities of the Continent, their
usages and festivals, more particularly some customs of my
native country. They never expressed astonishment, although
what they heard was utterly strange to them, and Giulia had
never yet seen a city, not even Bastia. I asked the girl how
old she was. "I am twenty years old," she said.
"That is impossible. You are scarce seventeen."
"She is sixteen years old," said the mother.
"What! do you not know your own birthday, Giulia?"
"No, but it stands in the register, and the Maire will
know it."
The Maire, therefore—happy man!—is the only person who
can celebrate the birthday of the pretty Giulia—that is, if he
chooses to put his great old horn-spectacles on his nose, and
turn over the register for it.
"Giulia, how do you amuse yourself? young people must
be merry."
"I have always enough to do; my brothers want something
every minute; on Sunday I go to mass."
"What fine clothes will you wear to-morrow?"
"I shall put on the faldetta."
She brought the faldetta from a press, and put it on; the
girl looked very beautiful in it. The faldetta is a long garment,
generally black, the end of which is thrown up behind
over the head, so that it has some resemblance to the hooded
cloak of a nun. To elderly women, the faldetta imparts dignity;
when it wraps the form of a young girl, its ample folds
add the charm of mystery.
The women asked me what I was. That was difficult to
answer. I took out my very unartistic sketch-book; and as
I turned over its leaves, I told them I was a painter.
"Have you come into the village," asked Giulia, "to colour
the walls?"
I laughed loudly and heartily; the question was an apt
criticism of my Corsican sketches. Marcantonio said very
seriously—"Don't; she does not understand such things."
These Corsican women have as yet no notion of the arts
and sciences; they read no romances, they play the cithern in
the twilight, and sing a melancholy vocero—a beautiful dirge,
which, perhaps, they themselves improvise. But in the little
circle of their ideas and feelings, their nature remains vigorous
and healthy as the nature that environs them—chaste, and
pious, and self-balanced, capable of all noble sacrifice, and
such heroic resolves, as the poetry of civilisation preserves to
all time as the highest examples of human magnanimity.
Antigone and Iphigenia can be matched in Corsica. There
is not a single high-souled act of which the record has descended
to us from antiquity but this uncultured people can
place a deed of equal heroism by its side.
In honour of our young Corsican Giulia, I shall relate the
following story. It is historical fact, like every other Corsican
tale that I shall tell.
It was about the end of the year 1768. The French had
occupied Oletta, a considerable village in the district of
Nebbio. As from the nature of its situation it was a post of
the highest importance, Paoli put himself in secret communication
with the inhabitants, and formed a plan for surprising
the French garrison and making them prisoners. They were
fifteen hundred in number, and commanded by the Marquis of
Arcambal. But the French were upon their guard; they proclaimed
martial law in Oletta, and maintained a strict and
watchful rule, so that the men of the village did not venture
to attempt anything.
Oletta was now still as the grave.
One day a young man named Giulio Saliceti left his village
to go into the Campagna, without the permission of the French
guard. On his return he was seized and thrown into prison;
after a short time, however, he was set at liberty.
The youth left his prison and took his way homewards, full
of resentment at the insult put upon him by the enemy. He
was noticed to mutter something to himself, probably curses
directed against the hated French. A sergeant heard him, and
gave him a blow in the face. This occurred in front of the
youth's house, at a window of which one of his relatives happened
to be standing—the Abbot Saliceti namely, whom the
people called Peverino, or Spanish Pepper, from his hot and
headlong temper. When Peverino saw the stroke fall upon
his kinsman's face, his blood boiled in his veins.
Giulio rushed into the house quite out of himself with
shame and anger, and was immediately taken by Peverino
into his chamber. After some time the two men were seen
to come out, calm, but ominously serious.
At night, other men secretly entered the house of the Saliceti,
sat together and deliberated. And what they deliberated
on was this: they proposed to blow up the church of Oletta,
which the French had turned into their barracks. They were
determined to have revenge and their liberty.
They dug a mine from Saliceti's house, terminating beneath
the church, and filled it with all the powder they had.
The date fixed for firing the mine was the 13th of February
1769, towards night.
Giulio had nursed his wrath till there was as little pity in
his heart as in a musket-bullet. "To-morrow!" he said
trembling, "to-morrow! Let me apply the match; they
struck me in the face; I will give them a stroke that shall
strike them as high as the clouds. I will blast them out
of Oletta, as if the bolts of heaven had got among them!
"But the women and children, and those who do not know
of it? The explosion will carry away every house in the
neighbourhood."
"They must be warned. They must be directed under this
or the other pretext to go to the other end of the village at
the hour fixed, and that in all quietness."
The conspirators gave orders to this effect.
Next evening, when the dreadful hour arrived, old men and
young, women, children, were seen betaking themselves in
silence and undefined alarm, with secrecy and speed, to the
other end of the village, and there assembling.
The suspicions of the French began to be aroused, and a
messenger from General Grand-Maison came galloping in,
and communicated in breathless haste the information which
his commander had received. Some one had betrayed the
plot. That instant the French threw themselves on Saliceti's
house and the powder-mine, and crushed the hellish undertaking.
Saliceti and a few of the conspirators cut their way through
the enemy with desperate courage, and escaped in safety from
Oletta. Others, however, were seized and put in chains. A
court-martial condemned fourteen of these to death by the
wheel, and seven unfortunates were actually broken, in terms
of the sentence.
Seven corpses were exposed to public view, in the square
before the Convent of Oletta. No burial was to be allowed
them. The French commandant had issued an order that no
one should dare to remove any of the bodies from the scaffold
for interment, under pain of death.
Blank dismay fell upon the village of Oletta. Every heart
was chilled with horror. Not a human being stirred abroad;
the fires upon the hearths were extinguished—no voice was
heard but the voice of weeping. The people remained in
their houses, but their thoughts turned continually to the
square before the convent, where the seven corpses lay upon
the scaffold.
The first night came. Maria Gentili Montalti was sitting
on her bed in her chamber. She was not weeping; she sat
with her head hanging on her breast, her hands in her lap,
her eyes closed. Sometimes a profound sob shook her frame.
It seemed to her as if a voice called, through the stillness of
the night, O Marì!
The dead, many a time in the stillness of the night, call the
name of those whom they have loved. Whoever answers,
must die.
O Bernardo! cried Maria—for she wished to die.
Bernardo lay before the convent on the scaffold; he was
the seventh and youngest of the dead. He was Maria's lover,
and their marriage was fixed for the following month. Now
he lay dead upon the scaffold.
Maria Gentili stood silent in the dark chamber, she listened
towards the side where the convent lay, and her soul held
converse with a spirit. Bernardo seemed to implore of her a
Christian burial.
But whoever removed a corpse from the scaffold and buried
it, was to be punished by death. Maria was resolved to bury
her beloved and then die.
She softly opened the door of her chamber in order to leave
the house. She passed through the room in which her aged
parents slept. She went to their bedside and listened to their
breathing. Then her heart began to quail, for she was the only
child of her parents, and their sole support, and when she
thought how her death by the hand of the public executioner
would bow her father and mother down into the grave, her
soul shrank back in great pain, and she turned, and made a
step towards her chamber.
At that moment she again heard the voice of her dead
lover wail: O Marì! O Marì! I loved thee so well, and now
thou forsakest me. In my mangled body lies the heart that
died still loving thee—bury me in the Church of St. Francis,
in the grave of my fathers, O Marì!
Maria opened the door of the house and passed out into the
night. With uncertain footsteps she gained the square of the
convent. The night was gloomy. Sometimes the storm came
and swept the clouds away, so that the moon shone down.
When its beams fell upon the convent, it was as if the light of
heaven refused to look upon what it there saw, and the moon
wrapped itself again in the black veil of clouds. For before
the convent a row of seven corpses lay on the red scaffold,
and the seventh was the corpse of a youth.
The owl and the raven screamed upon the tower; they
sang the vocero—the dirge for the dead. A grenadier was
walking up and down, with his musket on his shoulder, not
far off. No wonder that he shuddered to his inmost marrow,
and buried his face in his mantle, as he moved slowly up and
down.
Maria had wrapped herself in the black faldetta, that her
form might be the less distinct in the darkness of the night.
She breathed a prayer to the Holy Virgin, the Mother of Sorrows,
that she would help her, and then she walked swiftly to
the scaffold. It was the seventh body—she loosed Bernardo;
her heart, and a faint gleam from his dead face, told her that
it was he, even in the dark night. Maria took the dead man
in her arms, upon her shoulder. She had become strong, as
if with the strength of a man. She bore the corpse into the
Church of St. Francis.
There she sat down exhausted, on the steps of an altar,
over which the lamp of the Mother of God was burning.
The dead Bernardo lay upon her knees, as the dead Christ
once lay upon the knees of Mary. In the south they call
this group Pietà.
Not a sound in the church. The lamp glimmers above
the altar. Outside, a gust of wind that whistles by.
Maria rose. She let the dead Bernardo gently down upon
the steps of the altar. She went to the spot where the grave
of Bernardo's parents lay. She opened the grave. Then
she took up the dead body. She kissed him, and lowered
him into the grave, and again shut it. Maria knelt long
before the Mother of God, and prayed that Bernardo's soul
might have peace in heaven; and then she went silently
away to her house, and to her chamber.
When morning broke, Bernardo's corpse was missing from
among the dead bodies before the convent. The news flew
through the village, and the soldiers drummed alarm. It
was not doubted that the Leccia family had removed their
kinsman during the night from the scaffold; and instantly
their house was forced, its inmates taken prisoners, and
thrown chained into a jail. Guilty of capital crime, according
to the law that had been proclaimed, they were to suffer
the penalty, although they denied the deed.
Maria Gentili heard in her chamber what had happened.
Without saying a word, she hastened to the house of the
Count de Vaux, who had come to Oletta. She threw herself
at his feet, and begged the liberation of the prisoners. She
confessed that it was she who had done that of which they
were supposed to be guilty. "I have buried my betrothed,"
said she; "death is my due, here is my head; but restore
their freedom to those that suffer innocently."
The Count at first refused to believe what he heard; for
he held it impossible both that a weak girl should be capable
of such heroism, and that she should have sufficient strength
to accomplish what Maria had accomplished. When he had
convinced himself of the truth of her assertions, a thrill of
astonishment passed through him, and he was moved to tears.
"Go," said he, "generous-hearted girl, yourself release the
relations of your lover; and may God reward your heroism!"
On the same day the other six corpses were taken from the
scaffold, and received a Christian burial.
I wished to go from Oreto to Morosaglia, Paoli's native
place, through Orezza. Marcantonio had promised to accompany
me, and to provide good horses. He accordingly awoke
me early in the morning, and made ready to go. He had
put on his best clothes, wore a velvet jacket, and had shaved
himself very smoothly. The women fortified us for the journey
with a good breakfast, and we mounted our little Corsican
horses, and rode proudly forth.
It makes my heart glad yet to think of that Sunday morning,
and the ride through this romantic and beautiful land of
Orezza—over the green hills, through cool dells, over gushing
brooks, through the green oak-woods. Far as the eye can
reach on every side, those shady, fragrant chestnut-groves;
those giants of trees, in size such as I had never seen before.
Nature has here done everything, man so little. His chestnuts
are often a Corsican's entire estate; and in many instances
he has only six goats and six chestnut-trees, which
yield him his polleta. Government has already entertained
the idea of cutting down the forests of chestnuts, in order to
compel the Corsican to till the ground; but this would amount
to starving him. Many of these trees have trunks twelve feet
in thickness. With their full, fragrant foliage, long, broad,
dark leaves, and fibred, light-green fruit-husks, they are a
sight most grateful to the eye.
Beyond the paese of Casalta, we entered a singularly romantic
dell, through which the Fiumalto rushes. You find
everywhere here serpentine, and the exquisite marble called
Verde Antico. The engineers called the little district of
Orezza the elysium of geology; the waters of the stream roll
the beautiful stones along with them. Through endless balsamic
groves, up hill and down hill, we rode onwards to Piedicroce,
the principal town of Orezza, celebrated for its medicinal
springs; for Orezza, rich in minerals, is also rich in
mineral waters.
Francesco Marmocchi says, in his geography of the island:
"Mineral springs are the invariable characteristic of countries
which have been upheaved by the interior forces. Corsica,
which within a limited space presents the astonishing and
varied spectacle of the thousandfold workings of this ancient
struggle between the heated interior of the earth and its
cooled crust, was not likely to form an exception to this
general rule."
Corsica has, accordingly, its cold and its warm mineral
springs; and although these, so far as they have been counted,
are numerous, there can be no doubt that others still remain
undiscovered.
The natural phenomena of this beautiful island, and particularly
its mineralogy, have by no means as yet had sufficient
attention directed to them.
Up to the present time, fourteen mineral springs, warm
and cold, are accurately and fully known. The distribution
of these salubrious waters over the surface of the island, more
especially in respect to their temperature, is extremely unequal.
The region of the primary granite possesses eight, all
warm, and containing more or less sulphur, except one; while
the primary ophiolitic and calcareous regions possess only six,
one alone of which is warm.
The springs of Orezza, bursting forth at many spots, lie on
the right bank of the Fiumalto. The main spring is the only
one that is used; it is cold, acid, and contains iron. It
gushes out of a hill below Piedicroce in great abundance,
from a stone basin. No measures have been taken for the
convenience of strangers visiting the wells; these walk or ride
under their broad parasols down the hills into the green forest,
where they have planted their tents. After a ride of several
hours under the burning sun, and not under a parasol, I found
this vehemently effervescing water most delicious.
Piedicroce lies high. Its slender church-tower looks airily
down from the green hill. The Corsican churches among
the mountains frequently occupy enchantingly beautiful and
bold sites. Properly speaking, they stand already in the
heavens; and when the door opens, the clouds and the angels
might walk in along with the congregation.
A majestic thunderstorm was flaming round Piedicroce,
and echoed powerfully from hill to hill. We rode into the
paese to escape the torrents of rain. A young man, fashionably
dressed, sprang out of a house, and invited us to enter
his locanda. I found other two gentlemen within, with
daintily-trimmed beard and moustache, and of very active but
polished manners. They immediately wished to know my
commands; and nimble they were in executing them—one
whipped eggs, another brought wood and fire, the third minced
meat. The eldest of them had a nobly chiselled but excessively
pale face, with a long Slavonic moustache. So many
cooks to a simple meal, and such extremely genteel ones, I
was now for the first time honoured with. I was utterly
amazed till they told me who they were. They were two
fugitive Modenese, and a Hungarian. The Magyar told me,
as he stewed the meat, that he had been seven years lieutenant-general.
"Now I stand here and cook," he added;
"but such is the way of the world, when one has come to be
a poor devil in a foreign country, he must not stand on ceremony.
We have set up a locanda here for the season at the
wells, and have made very little by it."
As I looked at his pale face—he had caught fever at Aleria—I
felt touched.
We sat down together, Magyar, Lombard, Corsican, and
German, and talked of old times, and named many names of
modern celebrity or notoriety. How silent many of these become
before the one great name, Paoli! I dare not mention
them beside him; the noble citizen, the man of intellect and
action, will not endure their company.
The storm was nearly over, but the mountains still stood
plunged in mist. We mounted our horses in order to cross the
hills of San Pietro and reach Ampugnani. Thunder growled
and rolled among the misty summits, and clouds hung on every
side. A wild and dreary sadness lay heavily on the hills; now
and then still a flash of lightning; mountains as if sunk in a sea
of cloud, others stretching themselves upwards like giants;
wherever the veil rends, a rich landscape, green groves, black
villages—all this, as it seemed, flying past the rider; valley
and summit, cloister and tower, hill after hill, like dream-pictures
hanging among clouds. The wild elemental powers, that
sleep fettered in the soul of man, are ready at such moments
to burst their bonds, and rush madly forth. Who has not
experienced this mood on a wild sea, or when wandering
through the storm? and what we are then conscious of is the
same elemental power of nature that men call passion, when
it takes a determinate form. Forward, Antonio! Gallop the
little red horses along this misty hill, fast! faster! till clouds,
hills, cloisters, towers, fly with horse and rider. Hark! yonder
hangs a black church-tower, high up among the mists,
and the bells peal and peal Ave Maria—signal for the soul to
calm itself.
The villages are here small, picturesquely scattered everywhere
among the hills, lying high or in beautiful green
valleys. I counted from one point so many as seventeen,
with as many slender black church-towers. We passed numbers
of people on the road; men of the old historic land of
Orezza and Rostino, noble and powerful forms; their fathers
once formed the guard of Paoli.
At Polveroso, we had a magnificent glimpse of a deep valley,
in the middle of which lies Porta, the principal town of the
little district of Ampugnani, embosomed in chestnuts, now
dripping with the thunder-shower. Here stood formerly
the ancient Accia, a bishopric, not a trace of which remains.
Porta is an unusually handsome place, and many of its little
houses resemble elegant villas. The small yellow church has
a pretty façade, and a surprisingly graceful tower stands, in
Tuscan fashion, as isolated campanile or belfry by its side.
From the hill of San Pietro, you look down into the rows of
houses, and the narrow streets that group themselves about
the church, as into a trim little theatre. Porta is the birthplace
of Sebastiani.
The mountains now become balder, and more severe in
form, losing the chestnuts that previously adorned them. I
found huge thistles growing by the roadside, large almost as
trees, with magnificent, broad, finely-cut leaves, and hard
woody stem. Marcantonio had sunk into complete silence.
The Corsicans speak little, like the Spartans; my host of
Oreto was dumb as Harpocrates. I had ridden with him a
whole day through the mountains, and, from morning till
evening had never been able to draw him into conversation.
Only now and then he threw out some naïve question: "Have
you cannons? Have you hells in your country? Do fruits
grow with you? Are you wealthy?"
After Ave Maria, we at length reached the canton of Rostino
or Morosaglia, the country of Paoli, the most illustrious
of all the localities celebrated in Corsican history, and the
central point of the old democratic Terra del Commune. We
were still upon the Campagna, when Marcantonio took leave
of me; he was going to pass the night in a house at some distance,
and return home with the horses on the morrow. He
gave me a brotherly kiss, and turned away grave and silent;
and I, happy to find myself in this land of heroes and free
men, wandered on alone towards the convent of Morosaglia.
I have still an hour on the solitary plain, and, before entering
Paoli's house, I shall continue the history of his people and
himself at the point where I left off.
"Il cittadin non la città son io."—Alfieri's Timoleon.
After Pasquale Paoli and his brother Clemens, with their
companions, had left Corsica, the French easily made themselves
masters of the whole island. Only a few straggling
guerilla bands protracted the struggle a while longer among
the mountains. Among these, one noble patriot especially
deserves the love and admiration of future times—the poor
parish priest of Guagno—Domenico Leca, of the old family
of Giampolo. He had sworn upon the Gospels to abide true
to freedom, and to die sooner than give up the struggle.
When the whole country had submitted, and the enemy summoned
him to lay down his arms, he declared that he could
not violate his oath. He dismissed those of his people that
did not wish any longer to follow him, and threw himself,
with a faithful few, into the hills. For months he continued
the struggle, fighting, however, only when he was attacked,
and tending wounded foes with Christian compassion when
they fell into his hands. He inflicted injury on none except
in honourable conflict. In vain the French called on him to
come down, and live unmolested in his village. The priest of
Guagno wandered among the mountains, for he was resolved
to be free; and when all had forsaken him, the goat-herds gave
him shelter and sustenance. But one day he was found dead
in a cave, whence he had gone home to his Master, weary and
careworn, and a free man. A relative of Paoli and friend of
Alfieri—Giuseppe Ottaviano Savelli—has celebrated the memory
of the priest of Guagno in a Latin poem, with the title
of Vir Nemoris—The Man of the Forest.
Other Corsicans, too, who had gone into exile to Italy,
landed here and there, and attempted, like their forefathers,
Vincentello, Renuccio, Giampolo, and Sampiero, to free the
island. None of these attempts met with any success. Many
Corsicans were barbarously dragged off to prison—many sent
to the galleys at Toulon, as if they had been helots who had
revolted against their masters. Abattucci, who had been
one of the last to lay down arms, falsely accused of high
treason and convicted, was condemned in Bastia to branding
and the galleys. When Abattucci was sitting upon the
scaffold ready to endure the execution of the sentence, the
executioner shrank from applying the red-hot iron. "Do
your duty," cried a French judge; the man turned round to
the latter, and stretched the iron towards him, as if about to
brand the judge. Some time after, Abattucci was pardoned.
Meanwhile, Count Marbœuf had succeeded the Count de
Vaux in the command of Corsica. His government was on
the whole mild and beneficial; the ancient civic regulations
of the Corsicans, and their statutes, remained in force; the
Council of Twelve was restored, and the administration of
justice rendered more efficient. Efforts were also made to animate
agriculture, and the general industry of the now utterly
impoverished country. Marbœuf died in Bastia in 1786,
after governing Corsica for sixteen years.
When the French Revolution broke out, that mighty movement
absorbed all private interests of the Corsicans, and
these ardent lovers of liberty threw themselves with enthusiasm
into the current of the new time. The Corsican deputy,
Saliceti, proposed that the island should be incorporated with
France, in order that it might share in her constitution. This
took place, in terms of a decree of the Legislative Assembly, on
the 30th of November 1789, and excited universal exultation
throughout Corsica. Most singular and contradictory was the
turn affairs had taken. The same France, that twenty years
before had sent out her armies to annihilate the liberties and
the constitution of Corsica, now raised that constitution upon
her throne!
The Revolution recalled Paoli from his exile. He had
gone first to Tuscany, and thereafter to London, where the
court and ministers had given him an honourable reception.
He lived very retired in London, and little was heard of his
life or his employment. Paoli made no stir when he came to
England; the great man who had led the van for Europe on
her new career, withdrew into silence and obscurity in his
little house in Oxford Street. He made no magniloquent
speeches. All he could do was to act like a man, and, when that
was no longer permitted him, be proudly silent. The scholar of
Corte had said in his presence, in the oration from which I
have quoted: "If freedom were to be gained by mere talking,
then were the whole world free." Something might be learned
from the wisdom of this young student. When Napoleon,
like a genuine Corsican, taking refuge as a last resource in
an appeal to hospitality, claimed that of England from on
board the Bellerophon, he compared himself to Themistocles
when in the position of a suppliant for protection. He was
not entitled to compare himself with the great citizen of
Greece; Pasquale Paoli alone was that exiled Themistocles!
Here are one or two letters of this period:—
PAOLI TO HIS BROTHER CLEMENS,
(Who had remained in Tuscany.)
"London, Oct. 3, 1769.—I have received no letters from
you. I fear they have been intercepted, for our enemies are
very adroit at such things.... I was well received by the
king and queen. The ministers have called upon me. This
reception has displeased certain foreign ministers: I hear
they have lodged protests. I have promised to go on Sunday
into the country to visit the Duke of Gloucester, who is our
warm friend. I hope to obtain something here for the support
of our exiled fellow-countrymen, if Vienna does nothing.
The eyes of people here are beginning to be opened; they
acknowledge the importance of Corsica. The king has spoken
to me very earnestly of the affair; his kindness to me personally
made me feel embarrassed. My reception at court has
almost drawn upon me the displeasure of the opposition; so
that some of them have begun to lampoon me. Our enemies
sought to encourage them, letting it be understood with a mysterious
air, that I had sold our country; that I had bought an
estate in Switzerland with French gold, that our property had
not been touched by the French; and that they had an understanding
with these ministers, as they too are sold to France.
But I believe that all are now better informed; and every
one approved of my resolution not to mix myself up with the
designs of parties; but to further by all means that for which
it is my duty to labour, and for the advancement of which all
can unite, without compromising their individual relations.
"Send me an accurate list of all our friends who have gone
into banishment—we must not be afraid of expense; and send
me news of Corsica. The letters must come under the addresses
of private friends, otherwise they do not reach me.
I enjoy perfect health. This climate appears to me as yet
very mild.
"The Campagna is always quite green. He who has not
seen it can have no conception of the loveliness of spring. The
soil of England is crisped like the waves of the sea when the
wind moves them lightly. Men here, though excited by political
faction, live, as far as regards overt acts of violence, as
if they were the most intimate friends: they are benevolent,
sensible, generous in all things; and they are happy under a
constitution than which there can be no better. This city is
a world; and it is without doubt a finer town than all the
rest put together. Fleets seem to enter its river every moment;
I believe that Rome was neither greater nor richer.
What we in Corsica reckon in paoli, people here reckon in
guineas, that is, in louis-d'ors. I have written for a bill of
exchange; I have refused to hear of contributions intended
for me personally, till I know what conclusion they have come
to in regard to the others; but I know that their intentions
are good. In case they are obliged to temporize, finding their
hands tied at present, they will be ready the first war that
breaks out. I greet all; live happy, and do not think on
me."
CATHERINE OF RUSSIA TO PASQUALE PAOLI.
"St. Petersburg, April 27, 1770.
"Monsieur General de Paoli!—I have received your
letter from London, of the 15th February. All that Count
Alexis Orloff has let you know of my good intentions towards
you, Monsieur, is a result of the feelings with which your magnanimity,
and the high-spirited and noble manner in which
you have defended your country, have inspired me. I am
acquainted with the details of your residence in Pisa, and
with this among the rest, that you gained the esteem of all
those who had opportunities of intercourse with you. That is
the reward of virtue, in whatever situation it may find itself;
be assured that I shall always entertain the liveliest sympathy
for yours.
"The motive of your journey to England, was a natural
consequence of your sentiments with regard to your country.
Nothing is wanting to your good cause but favourable circumstances.
The natural interests of our empire, connected
as they are with those of Great Britain; the mutual friendship
between the two nations which results from this; the reception
which my fleets have met with on the same account, and
which my ships in the Mediterranean, and the commerce of
Russia, would have to expect from a free people in friendly
relations with my own, supply motives which cannot but be
favourable to you. You may, therefore, be assured, Monsieur,
that I shall not let slip the opportunities which will probably
occur, of rendering you all the good services that political conjunctures
may allow.
"The Turks have declared against me the most unjust war
that perhaps ever has been declared. At the present moment
I am only able to defend myself. The blessing of Heaven,
which has hitherto accompanied my cause, and which I pray
God to continue to me, shows sufficiently that justice cannot
be long suppressed, and that patience, hope, and courage,
though the world is full of the most difficult situations,
nevertheless attain their aim. I receive with pleasure, Monsieur,
the assurances of regard which you are pleased to
express, and I beg you will be convinced of the esteem with
which I am,
"Catherine."
Paoli had lived twenty long years an exile in London, when
he was summoned back to his native country. The Corsicans
sent him a deputation, and the French National Assembly,
in a pompous address, invited him to return.
On the 3d of April 1790, Paoli came for the first time to
Paris. He was fêted here as the Washington of Europe, and
Lafayette was constantly at his side. The National Assembly
received him with stormy acclamations, and elaborate oratory.
His reply was as follows:—
"Messieurs, this is the fairest and happiest day of my life.
I have spent my years in striving after liberty, and I find
here its noblest spectacle. I left my country in slavery, I find
it now in freedom. What more remains for me to desire?
After an absence of twenty years, I know not what alterations
tyranny may have produced among my countrymen; ah! it
cannot have been otherwise than fatal, for oppression demoralizes.
But in removing, as you have done, the chains from
the Corsicans, you have restored to them their ancient virtue.
Now that I am returning to my native country, you need entertain
no doubts as to the nature of my sentiments. You have
been magnanimous towards me, and I was never a slave. My
past conduct, which you have honoured with your approval, is
the pledge of my future course of action: my whole life, I may
say, has been an unbroken oath to liberty; it seems, therefore,
as if I had already sworn allegiance to the constitution which
you have established; but it still remains for me to give my
oath to the nation which adopts me, and to the monarch
whom I now acknowledge. This is the favour which I desire
of the august Assembly."
In the club of the Friends of the Constitution, Robespierre
thus addressed Paoli: "Ah! there was a time when we sought
to crush freedom in its last retreats. Yet no! that was the
crime of despotism—the French people have wiped away the
stain. What ample atonement to conquered Corsica, and
injured mankind! Noble citizens, you defended liberty at
a time when I did not so much as venture to hope for it.
You have suffered for liberty; you now triumph with it, and
your triumph is ours. Let us unite to preserve it for ever,
and may its base opponents turn pale with fear at the sight of
our sacred league."
Paoli had no foreboding of the position into which the course
of events was yet to bring him, in relation to this same France,
or that he was once more to stand opposed to her as a foe.
He left for Corsica. In Marseilles he was again received by a
Corsican deputation, with the members of which came the two
young club-leaders of Ajaccio—Joseph and Napoleon Bonaparte.
Paoli wept as he landed on Cape Corso and kissed the
soil of his native country; he was conducted in triumph from
canton to canton; and the Te Deum was sung throughout the
island.
Paoli, as President of the Assembly, and Lieutenant-general
of the Corsican National Guard, now devoted himself entirely
to the affairs of his country; in the year 1791 he also undertook
the command of the Division, and of the island. Although
the French Revolution had silenced the special interests of
the Corsicans, they began again to demand attention, and this
was particularly felt by Paoli, among whose virtues patriotism
was always uppermost. Paoli could never transform himself
into a Frenchman, or forget that his people had possessed independence,
and its own constitution. A coolness sprang up
between him and certain parties in the island; the aristocratic
French party, namely, on the one hand, composed of such men
as Gaffori, Rossi, Peretti, and Buttafuoco; and the extreme
democrats on the other, who saw the welfare of the world
nowhere but in the whirl of the French Revolution, such as
the Bonapartes, Saliceti, and Arenas.
The execution of the king, and the wild and extravagant
procedure of the popular leaders in Paris, shocked the philanthropic
Paoli. He gradually broke with France, and the
rupture became manifest after the unsuccessful French expedition
from Corsica against Sardinia, the failure of which was
attributed to Paoli. His opponents had lodged a formal accusation
against him and Pozzo di Borgo, the Procurator-general,
libelling them as Particularists, who wished to
separate the island from France.
The Convention summoned him to appear before its bar
and answer the accusations, and sent Saliceti, Lacombe, and
Delcher, as commissaries to the island. Paoli, however, refused
to obey the decree, and sent a dignified and firm address
to the Convention, in which he repelled the imputations made
upon him, and complained of their forcing a judicial investigation
upon an aged man, and a martyr for freedom. Was a
Paoli to stand in a court composed of windy declaimers and
play-actors, and then lay his head, grown gray in heroism,
beneath the knife of the guillotine? Was this to be the end
of a life that had produced such noble fruits?
The result of this refusal to obey the orders of the Convention,
was the complete revolt of Paoli and the Paolists from
France. The patriots prepared for a struggle, and published
such enactments as plainly intimated that they wished Corsica
to be considered as separated from France. The commissaries
hastened home to Paris; and after receiving their report, the
Convention declared Paoli guilty of high treason, and placed
him beyond the protection of the law. The island was split
into two hostile camps, the patriots and the republicans, and
already fighting had commenced.
Meanwhile Paoli had formed the plan of placing the island
under the protection of the English Government. No course
lay nearer or was more natural than this. He had already
entered into communication with Admiral Hood, who commanded
the English fleet before Toulon, and now with his
ships appeared on the Corsican coast. He landed near Fiorenzo
on the 2d of February. This fortress fell after a severe
bombardment; and the commandant of Bastia, General Antonio
Gentili, capitulated. Calvi alone, which had withstood
in previous centuries so many assaults, still held out, though
the English bombs made frightful havoc in the little town,
and all but reduced it to a heap of ruins. At length, on the
20th of July 1794, the fortress surrendered; the commandant,
Casabianca, capitulated, and embarked with his troops for
France. As Bonifazio and Ajaccio were already in the hands
of the Paolists, the Republicans could no longer maintain a
footing on the island. They emigrated, and Paoli and the
English remained undisputed masters of Corsica.
A general assembly now declared the island completely
severed from France, and placed it under the protection of
England. England, however, did not content herself with
a mere right of protection—she claimed the sovereignty of
Corsica; and this became the occasion of a rupture between
Paoli and Pozzo di Borgo, whom Sir Gilbert Elliot had won
for the English side. On the 10th of June 1794, the Corsicans
declared that they would unite their country to Great
Britain; that it was, however, to remain independent, and be
governed by a viceroy according to its own constitution.
Paoli had counted on the English king's naming him viceroy;
but he was deceived, for Gilbert Elliot was sent to
Corsica in this capacity—a serious blunder, since Elliot was
totally unacquainted with the condition of the island, and
his appointment could not but deeply wound Paoli.
The gray-haired man immediately withdrew into private
life; and as Elliot saw that his relation to the English, already
unpleasant, must soon become dangerous, he wrote to
George III. that the removal of Pasquale was desirable. This
was accomplished. The King of England, in a friendly letter,
invited Paoli to come to London, and spend his remaining
days in honour at the court. Paoli was in his own house at
Morosaglia when he received the letter. Sadly he now proceeded
to San Fiorenzo, where he embarked, and left his
country for the third and last time, in October 1795. The
great man shared the same fate as most of the legislators and
popular leaders of antiquity; he died rewarded with ingratitude,
unhappy, and in exile. The two greatest men of Corsica,
Pasquale and Napoleon, foes to each other, were both to end
their days and be buried on British territory.
The English government of Corsica—from ignorance of the
country very badly conducted—lasted only a short time. As
soon as Napoleon found himself victorious in Italy, he despatched
Generals Gentili and Casalta with troops to the
island; and scarcely had they made their appearance, when
the Corsicans, imbittered by the banishment of Paoli and
their other grievances, rose against the English. In almost
inexplicable haste they relinquished the island, from whose
people they were separated by wide and ineradicable differences
in national character; and by November 1796, not a
single Englishman remained in Corsica. The island was
now again under the supremacy of France.
Pasquale Paoli lived to see Napoleon Emperor. Fate
granted him at least the satisfaction of seeing a countryman
of his own the most prominent and the most powerful actor in
European history. After passing twelve years more of exile
in London, he died peacefully on the 5th of February 1807,
at the age of eighty-two, his mind to the last occupied with
thoughts of the people whom he had so warmly loved. He
was the patriarch and oldest legislator of European liberty.
In his last letter to his friend Padovani, the noble old man,
reviewing his life, says humbly:—
"I have lived long enough; and if it were granted me to
begin my life anew, I should reject the gift, unless it were
accompanied with the intelligent cognisance of my past life,
that I might repair the errors and follies by which it has
been marked."
One of the Corsican exiles announced his death to his
countrymen in the following letter:—
GIACOMORSI TO SIGNOR PADOVANI.
"London, July 2, 1807.
"It is, alas! true that the newspapers were correctly informed
when they published the death of the poor General.
He fell ill on Monday the 2d of February, about half-past
eight in the evening, and at half-past eleven on the night of
Thursday he died in my arms. He leaves to the University
at Corte salaries of fifty pounds a year each, for four professors;
and another mastership for the School of Rostino, which is to
be founded in Morosaglia.
"On the 13th of February, he was buried in St. Pancras,
where almost all Catholics are interred. His funeral will
have cost nearly five hundred pounds. About the middle of
last April, I and Dr. Barnabi went to Westminster Abbey to
find a spot where we shall erect a monument to him with his
bust.
"Paoli said when dying:—My nephews have little to
hope for; but I shall bequeath to them, for their consolation,
and as something to remember me by, this saying from the
Bible—'I have been young, and now am old, yet have I not
seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread.'"
It was late when I reached Rostino, or Morosaglia. Under
this name is understood, not a single paese, but a number
of villages scattered among the rude, stern hills. I found my
way with difficulty through these little neighbour hamlets to
the convent of Morosaglia, climbing rough paths over rocks,
and again descending under gigantic chestnuts. A locanda
stands opposite the convent, a rare phenomenon in the country
districts of Corsica. I found there a lively and intelligent
young man, who informed me he was director of the Paoli
School, and promised me his assistance for the following day.
In the morning, I went to the little village of Stretta, where
the three Paolis were born. One must see this Casa Paoli in
order rightly to comprehend the history of the Corsicans,
and award a just admiration to these singular men. The
house is a very wretched, black, village-cabin, standing on a
granite rock; a brooklet runs immediately past the door;
it is a rude structure of stone, with narrow apertures in the
walls, such as are seen in towers; the windows few, unsymmetrically
disposed, unglazed, with wooden shutters, as in
the time of Pasquale. When the Corsicans had elected him
their general, and he was expected home from Naples, Clemens
had glass put in the windows of the sitting-room, in order
to make the parental abode somewhat more comfortable for
his brother. But Paoli had no sooner entered and remarked
the luxurious alteration, than he broke every pane with his
stick, saying that he did not mean to live in his father's house
like a Duke, but like a born Corsican. The windows still
remain without glass; the eye overlooks from them the magnificent
panorama of the mountains of Niolo, as far as the
towering Monte Rotondo.
A relative of Paoli's—a simple country girl of the Tommasi
family—took me into the house. Everything in it
wears the stamp of humble peasant life. You mount a steep
wooden stair to the mean rooms, in which Paoli's wooden
table and wooden seat still stand. With joy, I saw myself in
the little chamber in which Pasquale was born; my emotions
on this spot were more lively and more agreeable than in the
birth-chamber of Napoleon.
Once more that fine face, with its classic, grave, and dignified
features, rose before me, and along with it the forms of a
noble father and a heroic brother. In this little room Pasquale
came to the world in April of the year 1724. His
mother was Dionisia Valentina, an excellent woman from a
village near Ponte Nuovo—the spot so fatal to her son. His
father, Hyacinth, we know already. He had been a physician,
and became general of the Corsicans along with Ceccaldi
and Giafferi. He was distinguished by exalted virtues,
and was worthy of the renown that attaches to his name as
the father of two such sons. Hyacinth had great oratorical
powers, and some reputation as a poet. Amid the din of arms
those powerful spirits had still time and genial force enough
to rise free above the actual circumstances of their condition,
and sing war-hymns, like Tyrtæus.
Here is a sonnet addressed by Hyacinth to the brave
Giafferi, after the battle of Borgo:—
"To crown unconquer'd Cyrnus' hero-son,
See death descend, and destiny bend low;
Vanquish'd Ligurians, by their sighs of wo,
Swelling fame's trumpet with a louder tone.
Scarce was the passage of the Golo won,
Than in their fort of strength he storm'd the foe.
Perils, superior numbers scorning so,
Vict'ry still follow'd where his arms had shone.
Chosen by Cyrnus, fate the choice approved,
Trusting the mighty conflict to his sword,
Which Europe rose to watch, and watching stands.
By that sword's flash, e'en fate itself is moved;
Thankless Liguria has its stroke deplored,
While Cyrnus takes her sceptre from his hands."
Such men are as if moulded of Greek bronze. They are
the men of Plutarch, and resemble Aristides, Epaminondas,
and Timoleon. They could resign themselves to privation,
and sacrifice their interests and their lives; they were simple,
sincere, stout-hearted citizens of their country. They had become
great by facts, not by theories, and the high nobility of
their principles had a basis, positive and real, in their actions
and experiences. If we are to express the entire nature of
these men in one word, that word is Virtue, and they were
worthy of virtue's fairest reward—Freedom.
My glance falls upon the portrait of Pasquale. I could
not wish to imagine him otherwise. His head is large
and regular; his brow arched and high, the hair long and
flowing; his eyebrows bushy, falling a little down into the
eyes, as if swift to contract and frown; but the blue eyes are
luminous, large, and free—full of clear, perceptive intellect;
and an air of gentleness, dignity, and benevolence, pervades
the beardless, open countenance.
One of my greatest pleasures is to look at portraits and
busts of great men. Four periods of these attract and reward
our examination most—the heads of Greece; the Roman
heads; the heads of the great fifteenth and sixteenth centuries;
and the heads of the eighteenth century. It would
be an almost endless labour to arrange by themselves the
busts of the great men of the eighteenth century; but such
a Museum would richly reward the trouble. When I see a
certain group of these together, it seems to me as if I recognised
a family resemblance prevailing in it—a resemblance
arising from the presence in each, of one and the same spiritual
principle—Pasquale, Washington, Franklin, Vico, Genovesi,
Filangieri, Herder, Pestalozzi, Lessing.
Pasquale's head is strikingly like that of Alfieri. Although
the latter, like Byron, aristocratic, proud, and unbendingly
egotistic, widely differs in many respects from his contemporary,
Pasquale—the peaceful, philanthrophic citizen; he had
nevertheless a soul full of a marvellous energy, and burning
with the hatred of tyranny. He could understand such a
nature as Paoli's better than Frederick the Great. Frederick
once sent to this house a present for Paoli—a sword bearing
the inscription, Libertas, Patria. Away in distant Prussia,
the great king took Pasquale for an unusually able soldier.
He was no soldier; his brother Clemens was his sword; he
was the thinking head—a citizen and a strong and high-hearted
man. Alfieri comprehended him better, he dedicated
his Timoleon to him, and sent him the poem with this letter:—
TO SIGNOR PASQUALE PAOLI, THE NOBLE DEFENDER
OF CORSICA.
"To write tragedies on the subject of liberty, in the language
of a country which does not possess liberty, will perhaps,
with justice, appear mere folly to those who look no
further than the present. But he who draws conclusions for
the future from the constant vicissitudes of the past, cannot
pronounce such a rash judgment. I therefore dedicate this
my tragedy to you, as one of the enlightened few—one who,
because he can form the most correct idea of other times,
other nations, and high principles—is also worthy to have
been born and to have been active in a less effeminate century
than ours. Although it has not been permitted you
to give your country its freedom, I do not, as the mob
is wont to do, judge of men according to their success, but
according to their actions, and hold you entirely worthy to
listen to the sentiments of Timoleon, as sentiments which you
are thoroughly able to understand, and with which you can
sympathize.
Vittoria Alfieri."
Alfieri inscribed on the copy of his tragedy which he sent
to Pasquale, the following verses:—
"To Paoli, the noble Corsican
Who made himself the teacher and the friend
Of the young France.
Thou with the sword hast tried, I with the pen,
In vain to rouse our Italy from slumber.
Now read; perchance my hand interprets rightly
The meaning of thy heart."
Alfieri exhibited much delicacy of perception in dedicating
the Timoleon to Paoli—the tragedy of a republican, who had
once, in the neighbouring Sicily, given wise democratic laws
to a liberated people, and then died as a private citizen.
Plutarch was a favourite author with Paoli, as with most of
the great men of the eighteenth century, and Epaminondas
was his favourite hero; the two were kindred natures—both
despised pomp and expensive living, and did not imagine that
their patriotic services and endeavours were incompatible
with the outward style of citizens and commoners. Pasquale
was fond of reading: he had a choice library, and his memory
was retentive. An old man told me that once, when as
a boy he was walking along the road with a school-fellow,
and reciting a passage from Virgil, Paoli accidentally came
up behind him, slapped him on the shoulder, and proceeded
himself with the passage.
Many particulars of Paoli's habits are still remembered by
the people here. The old men have seen him walking about
under these chestnuts, in a long green, gold-laced coat,[N]
and a vest of brown Corsican cloth. When he showed himself,
he was always surrounded by his peasantry, whom he
treated as equals. He was accessible to all, and he maintained
a lively recollection of an occasion when he had
deeply to repent his having shut himself up for an hour.
It was one day during the last struggle for independence;
he was in Sollacaro, embarrassed with an accumulation of
business, and had ordered the sentry to allow no one admission.
After some time a woman appeared, accompanied by
an armed youth. The woman was in mourning, wrapped in
the faldetta, and wore round her neck a black ribbon, to
which a Moor's head, in silver—the Corsican arms—was
attached. She attempted to enter—the sentry repelled her.
Paoli, hearing a noise, opened the door, and demanded hastily
and imperiously what she wanted. The woman said with
mournful calmness: "Signor, be so good as listen to me. I
was the mother of two sons; the one fell at the Tower of
Girolata; the other stands here. I come to give him to his
country, that he may supply the place of his dead brother."
She turned to the youth, and said to him: "My son, do not
forget that you are more your country's child than mine."
The woman went away. Paoli stood a moment as if thunderstruck;
then he sprang after her, embraced with emotion
mother and son, and introduced them to his officers. Paoli
said afterwards that he never felt so embarrassed as before
that noble-hearted woman.
He never married; his people were his family. His only
niece, the daughter of his brother Clemens, was married to a
Corsican called Barbaggi. But Paoli himself, capable of all
the virtues of friendship, was not without a noble female
friend, a woman of talent and glowing patriotism, to whom
the greatest men of the country confided their political ideas
and plans. This Corsican Roland, however, kept no salon;
she was a nun, of the noble house of Rivarola. A single circumstance
evinces the ardent sympathy of this nun for the
patriotic struggles of her countrymen; after Achille Murati's
bold conquest of Capraja, she herself, in her exultation at
the success of the enterprise, went over to the island, as if to
take possession of it in the name of Paoli. Many of Pasquale's
letters are addressed to the Signora Monaca, and are altogether
occupied with politics, as if they had been written to a
man.
The incredible activity of Paoli appears from his collected
letters. The talented Italian Tommaseo (at present living
in exile in Corfu) has published a large volume containing
the most important of these. They are highly interesting,
and exhibit a manly, vigorous, and clear intellect. Paoli
disliked writing—he dictated, like Napoleon; he could not sit
long, his continually active mind allowed him no rest. It is
said of him that he never knew the date; that he could read
the future, and that he frequently had visions.
Paoli's memory is very sacred with his people. Napoleon
elates the soul of the Corsican with pride, because he was his
brother; but when you name the name of Paoli, his eye
brightens like that of a son, at the mention of a noble departed
father. It is impossible for a man to be more loved
and honoured by a whole nation after his death than Pasquale
Paoli; and if posthumous fame is a second life, then Corsica's
and Italy's greatest man of the eighteenth century lives a thousandfold—yes,
lives in every Corsican heart, from the tottering
graybeard who knew him in his youth, to the child on whose
soul his high example is impressed. No greater name can be
given to a man than "Father of his country." Flattery has
often abused it and made it ridiculous; among the Corsicans
I saw that it could also be applied with truth and justice.
Paoli contrasts with Napoleon, as philanthropy with self-love.
No curses of the dead rise to execrate his name. At
the nod of Napoleon, millions of human beings were murdered
for the sake of fame and power. The blood that Paoli shed,
flowed for freedom, and his country gave it freely as that
mother-bird that wounds her breast to give her fainting brood
to drink.
No battle-field makes Paoli's name illustrious; but his
memory is here honoured by the foundation-school of Morosaglia,
and this fame seems to me more human and more
beautiful than the fame of Marengo or the Pyramids.
I visited this school, the bequest of the noble patriot. The
old convent supplies an edifice. It consists of two classes;
the lower containing one hundred and fifty scholars, the upper
about forty. But two teachers are insufficient for the large
number of pupils. The rector of the lower class was so friendly
as to hold a little examination in my presence. I here again
remarked the naïveté of the Corsican character, as displayed
by the boys. There were upwards of a hundred, between the
ages of six and fourteen, separated into divisions, wild, brown
little fellows, tattered and torn, unwashed, all with their caps
on their heads. Some wore crosses of honour suspended on
red ribbons; and these looked comical enough on the breasts
of the little brown rascals—sitting, perhaps, with their heads
supported between their two fists, and staring, frank and
free, with their black eyes at all within range—proud, probably,
of being Paoli scholars. These honours are distributed
every Saturday, and worn by the pupil for a week; a
silly, and at the same time, hurtful French practice, which
tends to encourage bad passions, and to drive the Corsican—in
whom nature has already implanted an unusual thirst for
distinction—even in his boyhood, to a false ambition. These
young Spartans were reading Telemachus. On my requesting
the rector to allow them to translate the French into
Italian, that I might see how they were at home in their
mother-tongue, he excused himself with the express prohibition
of the Government, which "does not permit Italian in the
schools." The branches taught were writing, reading, arithmetic,
and the elements of geography and biblical history.
The schoolroom of the lower class is the chapter-hall of the
old convent in which Clemens Paoli dreamed away the closing
days of his life. Such a spacious, airy Aula as that in
which these Corsican youngsters pursue their studies, with
the view from its windows of the mighty hills of Niolo, and
the battle-fields of their sires, would be an improvement in
many a German university. The heroic grandeur of external
nature in Corsica seems to me to form, along with the recollections
of their past history, the great source of cultivation
for the Corsican people; and there is no little importance in
the glance which that Corsican boy is now fixing on the portrait
yonder on the wall—for it is the portrait of Pasquale
Paoli.
"Blessed be the Lord my strength, who teacheth my hands to war, and my fingers
to fight."—Psalm cxliv.
The convent of Morosaglia is perhaps the most venerable
monument of Corsican history. The hoary structure as it
stands there, brown and gloomy, with the tall, frowning pile
of its campanile by its side, seems itself a tradition in stone.
It was formerly a Franciscan cloister. Here, frequently, the
Corsican parliaments were held. Here Pasquale had his
rooms, his bureaus, and often, during the summer, he was to
be seen among the monks—who, when the time came, did
not shrink from carrying the crucifix into the fight, at the
head of their countrymen. The same convent was also a
favourite residence of his brave brother Clemens, and he died
here, in one of the cells, in the year 1793.
Clemens Paoli is a highly remarkable character. He resembles
one of the Maccabees, or a crusader glowing with
religious fervour. He was the eldest son of Hyacinth. He
had served with distinction as a soldier in Naples; then he
was made one of the generals of the Corsicans. But state affairs
did not accord with his enthusiastic turn of mind. When
his brother was placed at the head of the Government he
withdrew into private life, assumed the garb of the Tertiaries,
and buried himself in religious contemplation. Like
Joshua, he lay entranced in prayer before the Lord, and
rose from prayer to rush into battle, for the Lord had given
his foes into his hand. He was the mightiest in fight, and
the humblest before God. His gloomy nature has something
in it prophetic, flaming, self-abasing, like that of Ali.
Wherever the danger was greatest, he appeared like an
avenging angel. He rescued his brother at the convent of
Bozio, when he was besieged there by Marius Matra; he expelled
the Genoese from the district of Orezza, after a frightful
conflict. He took San Pellegrino and San Fiorenzo; in
innumerable fights he came off victorious. When the Genoese
assaulted the fortified camp at Furiani with their entire force,
Clemens remained for fifty-six days firm and unsubdued among
the ruins, though the whole village was a heap of ashes. A
thousand bombs fell around him, but he prayed to the God
of hosts, and did not flinch, and victory was on his side.
Corsica owed her freedom to Pasquale, as the man who
organized her resources; but to Clemens alone as the soldier
who won it with his sword. He signalized himself also subsequently
in the campaign of 1769, by the most splendid
deeds of arms. He gained the glorious victory of Borgo; he
fought desperately at Ponte Nuovo, and when all was lost,
he hastened to rescue his brother. He threw himself with a
handful of brave followers in the direction of Niolo, to intercept
General Narbonne, and protect his brother's flight. As
soon as he had succeeded in this, he hastened to Pasquale at
Bastelica, and sorrowfully embarked with him for Tuscany.
He did not go to England. He remained in Tuscany; for
the strange language of a foreign country would have deepened
his affliction. Among the monks in the beautiful,
solitary cloister of Vallombrosa, he sank again into fervent
prayer and severe penance; and no one who saw this monk
lying in prayer upon his knees, could have recognised in
him the hero of patriot struggles, and the soldier terrible in
fight.
After twenty years of cloister-life in Tuscany, Clemens returned
shortly before his brother to Corsica. Once more his
heart glowed with the hope of freedom for his country; but
events soon taught the grayhaired hero that Corsica was lost
for ever. In sorrow and penance he died in December of the
same year in which his brother was summoned before the
Convention, to answer the charge of high treason.
In Clemens, patriotism had become a cultus and a religion.
A great and holy passion, stirred to an intense glow, is in
itself religious; when it takes possession of a people, more
especially when it does so in periods of calamity and severe
pressure, it expresses itself as religious worship. The priests
in those days preached battle from every pulpit, the monks
marched with the ranks into the fight, and the crucifixes
served instead of standards. The parliaments were generally
held in convents, as if God himself were to preside over
them, and once, as we saw in their history, the Corsicans by
a decree of their Assembly placed the country under the protection
of the Holy Virgin.
Pasquale, too, was religious. I saw in his house the little
dark room which he had made into a chapel; it had been
allowed to remain unchanged. He there prayed daily to God.
But Clemens lay for six or seven hours each day in prayer. He
prayed even in the thick of battle—a figure terrible to look on,
with his beads in one hand and his musket in the other, clad
like the meanest Corsican, and not to be recognised save by his
great fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows. It is said of him that
he could load his piece with furious rapidity, and that, always
sure of his aim, he first prayed for mercy to the soul of the
man he was about to shoot, then crying: "Poor mother!"
he sacrificed his foe to the God of freedom. When the battle
was over, he was gentle and mild, but always grave and profoundly
melancholy. A frequent saying of his was: "My
blood and my life are my country's; my soul and my thoughts
are my God's."
Men of Pasquale's type are to be sought among the Greeks;
but the types of Clemens among the Maccabees. He was not
one of Plutarch's heroes; he was a hero of the Old Testament.
I had heard in Stretta that a countryman of mine was
living there, a Prussian—a strange old man, lame, and obliged
to use crutches. The townspeople had also informed him of
my arrival. Just as I was leaving the chamber in which Clemens
Paoli had died, lost in meditation on the character of
this God-fearing old hero, my lame countryman came hopping
up to me, and shook hands with me in the honest and
hearty German style. I had breakfast set for us; we sat
down, and I listened for several hours to the curious stories
of old Augustine of Nordhausen.
"My father," he said, "was a Protestant clergyman, and
wished to educate me in the Lutheran faith; but from my
childhood I was dissatisfied with Protestantism, and saw well
that the Lutheran persuasion was a vile corruption of the only
true church—the church in spirit and in truth. I took it
into my head to become a missionary. I went to the Latin
School in Nordhausen, and remained there until I entered the
classes of logic and rhetoric. And after learning rhetoric, I
left my native country to go to the beautiful land of Italy, to
a Trappist convent at Casamari, where I held my peace for
eleven years."
"But, friend Augustine, how were you able to endure
that?"
"Well, it needs a merry heart to bear it: a melancholy
man becomes mad among the Trappists. I understood the
carpenter-trade, and worked at it all day, beguiling my weariness
by singing songs to myself in my heart."
"What had you to eat in the convent?"
"Two platefuls of broth, as much bread as we liked, and
half a bottle of wine. I ate little, but I never left a drop of
wine in my flask. God be praised for the excellent wine!
The brother on my right was always hungry, and ate his two
platefuls of broth and five rolls to the bargain."
"Have you ever seen Pope Pio Nono?"
"Yes, and spoken with him too, just like a friend. He
was then bishop in Rieti; and, one Good-Friday, I went
thither in my capote—I was in a different convent then—to
fetch the holy oil. I was at that time very ill. The Pope
kissed my capote, when I went to him in the evening to take
my leave. 'Fra Agostino,' said he, 'you are sick, you must
have something to eat.' 'My lord bishop,' said I, 'I never
saw a brother eat on Good-Friday.' 'No matter, I give you
a dispensation; I see you are sick.' And he sent to the best
inn in the town, and they brought me half a fowl, some soup,
wine, and confectionary; and the bishop made me sit down
to table with him."
"What! did the holy Father eat on Good-Friday?"
"Only three nuts and three figs. After this I grew worse,
and removed to Toscana. But one day I ceased to find pleasure
in the ways of men; their deeds were hateful to me. I
resolved to become a hermit. So I took my tools, purchased
a few necessaries, and sailed to the little island of Monte
Cristo. The island is nine miles[O] round; not a living thing
dwells on it but wild goats, serpents, and rats. In ancient
times the Emperor Diocletian banished Saint Mamilian
there—the Archbishop of Palermo. The good saint built
a church upon the island; a convent also was afterwards
erected. Fifty monks once lived there—first Benedictines,
then Cistercians, and afterwards Carthusians of the Order of
St. Bruno. The monks of Monte Cristo built many hospitals,
and did much good in Toscana; the hospital of Maria
Novella in Florence, too, was founded by them. Then, you
see, came the Saracens, and carried off the monks of Monte
Cristo with their oxen and their servants; the goats they could
not catch—they escaped to the mountains, and have ever
since lived wild among rocks."
"Did you stay in the old convent?"
"No, it is in ruins. I lived in a cave, which I fitted up
with the help of my tools. I built a wall, too, before the
mouth of it."
"How did you spend the long days? You prayed a great
deal, I suppose?"
"Ah, no! I am no Pharisee. One can't pray much. Whatever
God wills must happen. I had my flute; and I amused
myself with shooting the wild goats; or explored the island
for stones and plants; or watched the sea as it rose and fell
upon the rocks. I had books to read, too."
"Such as?"—
"The works of the Jesuit Paul Pater Segneri."
"What grows upon the island?"
"Nothing but heath and bilberries. There are one or two
pretty little green valleys, and all the rest is gray rock. A
Sardinian once visited the island, and gave me some seeds;
so I grew a few vegetables and planted some trees."
"Are there any fine kinds of stone to be found there?"
"Well, there is beautiful granite, and black tourmaline,
which is found in a white stone; and I also discovered three
different kinds of garnets. At last I fell sick in Monte Cristo—sick
to death, when there happily arrived a number of
Tuscans, who carried me to the mainland. I have now
been eleven years in this cursed island, living among scoundrels—thorough
scoundrels. The doctors sent me here; but
I hope to see Italy again before a year is over. There is no
country in the world like Italy to live in, and they are a
fine people the Italians. I am growing old, I have to go upon
crutches; and I one day said to myself, 'What am I to do?
I must soon give up my joiner's work, but I cannot beg;' so
I went and roamed about the mountains, and by good fortune
discovered Negroponte."
"Negroponte? what is that?"
"The clay with which they make pipes in the island of
Negroponte; we call it meerschaum at home, you know. Ah,
it is a beautiful earth—the very flower of minerals. The Negroponte
here is as good as that in Turkey, and when I have
my pipes finished, I shall be able to say that I am the first
Christian that has ever worked in it."
Old Augustine would not let me off till I had paid a visit
to his laboratory. He had established himself in one of the
rooms formerly occupied by poor Clemens Paoli, and pointed
out to me with pride his Negroponte and the pipes he had
been engaged in making, and which he had laid in the sun
to dry.
I believe that, once in his life, there comes to every man a
time when he would fain leave the society of men, and go into
the green woods and be a hermit, and an hour when his soul
would gladly find rest even in the religious silence of the
Trappist.
I have here told my reader the brief story of old Augustine's
life, because it attracted me so strongly at the time,
and seemed to me a true specimen of German character.
"Gallia vicisti! profuso turpiter auro
Armis pauca, dolo plurima, jure nihil!"—The Corsicans.
I left Morosaglia before Ave Maria, to descend the hills
to Ponte Nuovo. Near the battle-field is the post-house of
Ponte alla Leccia, where the Diligence from Bastia arrives
after midnight, and with it I intended to return to Bastia.
The evening was beautiful and clear—the stillness of the
mountain solitude stimulated thought. The twilight is here
very short. Hardly is Ave Maria over when the night
comes.
I seldom hear the bells pealing Ave Maria without remembering
those verses of Dante, in which he refers to the softened
mood that descends with the fall of evening on the
traveller by sea or land:—
"It was the hour that wakes regret anew
In men at sea, and melts the heart to tears,
The day whereon they bade sweet friends adieu,
And thrills the youthful pilgrim on his way
With thoughts of love, if from afar he hears
The vesper bell, that mourns the dying day."
A single cypress stands yonder on the hill, kindled by the
red glow of evening, like an altar taper. It is a tree that
suits the hour and the mood—an Ave Maria tree, monumental
as an obelisk, dark and mournful. Those avenues of
cypresses leading to the cloisters and burying-grounds in Italy
are very beautiful. We have the weeping-willow. Both are
genuine churchyard trees, yet each in a way of its own. The
willow with its drooping branches points downwards to the
tomb, the cypress rises straight upwards, and points from the
grave to heaven. The one expresses inconsolable grief, the
other believing hope. The symbolism of trees is a significant
indication of the unity of man and nature, which he constantly
draws into the sphere of his emotions, to share in them, or
to interpret them. The fir, the laurel, the oak, the olive, the
palm, have all their higher meaning, and are poetical language.
I saw few cypresses in Corsica, and these of no great size;
and yet such a tree would be in its place in this Island of
Death. But the tree of peace grows here on every hand; the
war-goddess Minerva, to whom the olive is sacred, is also the
goddess of peace.
I had fifteen miles to walk from Morosaglia, all the way
through wild, silent hills, the towering summits of Niolo constantly
in view, the snow-capped Cinto, Artiga, and Monte
Rotondo, the last named nine thousand feet in height, and the
highest hill in Corsica. It stood bathed in a glowing violet,
and its snow-fields gleamed rosy red. I had already been on
its summit, and recognised distinctly, to my great delight, the
extreme pinnacle of rock on which I had stood with a goatherd.
When the moon rose above the mountains, the picture
was touched with a beauty as of enchantment.
Onwards through the moonlight and the breathless silence
of the mountain wilds; not a sound to be heard, except sometimes
the tinkling of a brook; the rocks glittering where they
catch the moonlight like wrought silver; nowhere a village, nor
a human soul. I went at hap-hazard in the direction where
I saw far below in the valley the mists rising from the Golo.
Yet it appeared to me that I had taken a wrong road, and I
was on the point of crossing through a ravine to the other
side, when I met some muleteers, who told me that I had taken
not only the right but very shortest road to my destination.
At length I reached the Golo. The river flows through a
wide valley; the air is full of fever, and is shunned. It is the
atmosphere of a battle-field—of the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo.
I was warned in Morosaglia against passing through the night-mists
of the Golo, or staying long in Ponte alla Leccia. Those
who wander much there are apt to hear the ghosts beating the
death-drum, or calling their names; they are sure at least to
catch fever, and see visions. I believe I had a slight touch
of the last affection, for I saw the whole battle of the Golo
before me, the frightful monk, Clemens Paoli in the thickest
of it, with his great fiery eyes and bushy eyebrows, his rosary
in the one hand, and his firelock in the other, crying mercy
on the soul of him he was about to shoot. Wild flight—wounded—dying!
"The Corsicans," says Peter Cyrnæus, "are men who are
ready to die." The following is a characteristic trait:—A
Frenchman came upon a Corsican who had received his death-wound,
and lay waiting for death without complaint. "What
do you do," he asked, "when you are wounded, without physicians,
without hospitals?" "We die!" said the Corsican, with
the laconism of a Spartan. A people of such manly breadth
and force of character as the Corsicans, is really scarcely honoured
by comparison with the ancient heroic nations. Yet
Lacedæmon is constantly present to me here. If it is allowable
to say that the spirit of the Hellenes lives again in the
wonderfully-gifted people of Italy, this is mainly true, in my
opinion, as applied to the two countries—and they are neighbours
of each other—of Tuscany and Corsica. The former
exhibits all the ideal opulence of the Ionic genius; and while
her poets, from Dante and Petrarch to the time of Ariosto,
sang in her melodious language, and her artists, in painting,
sculpture, and architecture, renewed the days of Pericles;
while her great historians rivalled the fame of Thucydides,
and the philosophers of her Academy filled the world with
Platonic ideas, here in Corsica the rugged Doric spirit again
revived, and battles of Spartan heroism were fought.
The young Napoleon visited the battle-field of the Golo in
the year 1790. He was then twenty-one years old; but he
had probably seen it before when a boy. There is something
fearfully suggestive in this: Napoleon on the first battle-field
that his eyes ever lighted on—a stripling, without career, and
without stain of guilt, he who was yet to crimson a hemisphere—from
the ocean to the Volga, and from the Alps to
the wastes of Lybia—with the blood of his battle-fields.
It was a night such as this when the young Napoleon
roamed here on the field of Golo. He sat down by the river,
which on that day of battle, as the people tell, rolled down
corpses, and ran red for four-and-twenty miles to the sea.
The feverous mist made his head heavy, and filled it with
dreams. A spirit stood behind him—a red sword in its hand.
The spirit touched him, and sped away, and the soul of the
young Napoleon followed the spirit through the air. They
hovered over a field—a bloody battle was being fought there—a
young general is seen galloping over the corpses of the
slain. "Montenotte!" cried the demon; "and it is thou
that fightest this battle!" They flew on. They hover over
a field—a bloody battle is fighting there—a young general
rushes through clouds of smoke, a flag in his hand, over a
bridge. "Lodi!" cried the demon; "and it is thou that fightest
this battle!" On and on, from battle-field to battle-field.
They halt above a stream; ships are burning on it; its waves
roll blood and corpses. "The Pyramids!" cries the demon;
"this battle too thou shalt fight!" And so they continue
their flight from one battle-field to another; and, one after
the other, the spirit utters the dread names—"Marengo! Austerlitz!
Eylau! Friedland! Wagram! Smolensk! Borodino!
Beresina! Leipzig!" till he is hovering over the last battle-field,
and cries, with a voice of thunder, "Waterloo! Emperor,
thy last battle!—and here thou shalt fall!"
The young Napoleon sprang to his feet, there on the banks
of the Golo, and he shuddered; he had dreamt a mad and a
fearful dream.
Now that whole bloody phantasmagoria was a consequence
of the same vile exhalations of the Golo that were beginning
to take effect on myself. In this wan moonlight, and on
this steaming Corsican battle-field, if anywhere, it must be
pardonable to have visions. Above yon black, primeval,
granite hills hangs the red moon—no! it is the moon no
longer, it is a great, pale, bloody, horrid head that hovers
over the island of Corsica, and dumbly gazes down on it—a
Medusa-head, a Vendetta-head, snaky-haired, horrible. He
who dares to look on this head becomes—not stone, but an
Orestes seized by madness and the Furies, so that he shall
murder in headlong passion, and then wander from mountain
to mountain, and from cavern to cavern, behind him the avengers
of blood and the sleuthhounds of the law that give him
no moment's peace.
What fantasies! and they will not leave me! But, Heaven
be praised! there is the post-house of Ponte alla Leccia, and
I hear the dogs bark. In the large desolate room sit some
men at a table round a steaming oil-lamp; they hang their
heads on their breasts, and are heavy with sleep. A priest,
in a long black coat, and black hat, is walking to and fro; I
will begin a conversation with the holy man, that he may drive
the vile rout of ghosts and demons out of my head.
But although this priest was a man of unshaken orthodoxy,
he could not exorcise the wicked Golo-spirit, and I arrived in
Bastia with the most violent of headaches. I complained to
my hostess of what the sun and the fog had done to me, and
began to believe I should die unlamented on a foreign shore.
The hostess said there was no help unless a wise woman came
and made the orazion over me. However, I declined the
orazion, and expressed a wish to sleep. I slept the deepest
sleep for one whole day and a night. When I awoke, the
blessed sun stood high and glorious in the heavens.
