CHAPTER X.

CLEMENS 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.