CHAPTER II.

THE CASA BONAPARTE.

The narrow street of St. Charles issues upon a little square. An elm stands there before an oldish three-storied house, the plaster of which has been coloured a yellowish-gray; it has a flat roof, and a balustrade above it, a front of six windows in breadth, and doors that look greatly decayed. On the corner of this house you read the words: "_Place Letitia_."

No marble tablet tells the stranger who has come from Italy, where the houses of great men always bear inscriptions, that he stands before the house of the Bonapartes. He knocks in vain at the door; no voice answers, and all the windows are closely veiled with gray jalousies, as if the house were in a state of siege from the Vendetta. Not a human being is stirring upon the square; a deathlike stillness rests upon the neighbourhood, as if the name of Napoleon had frightened it into silence, or scared all else away.

At length an old man appeared at the window of a house close by, and requested me to return in two hours, when he should be able to give me the key.

Bonaparte's house, which has, I am assured, sustained but slight alteration, though no palace, has plainly been the dwelling of a patrician family. Its appearance shows this, and it is without doubt a palace compared with the village-cabin in which Pasquale Paoli was born. It is roomy, handsome, and convenient. But the rooms are destitute of furniture; the tapestries alone have been left on the walls, and they are decayed. The floor, which, as is usual in Corsica, is laid out in small hexagonal red flags, is here and there ruinous. The darkness produced in the rooms by the closed jalousies, and their emptiness, made them quite dismal.

Once, in the time of the beautiful Letitia, this house was alive with the busy stir of a numerous family, and brilliant with joyous hospitality. Now, it is like a tomb, and in vain you look around you for a single object on which fancy may hang associations with the history of its enigmatic inhabitants. The naked walls can tell no tale.

I do not know when the Casa Bonaparte was erected, but it can hardly be very old. It was built, no doubt, when the Genoese were supreme in the island, perhaps when Louis Quatorze was filling the world with his own fame, and with the fame of France. I thought of the time when the master of the craftsmen who erected it pronounced over the house, on its completion, the customary blessing, and when, according to ancient usage, the family for whom it had been built was solemnly conducted into it by an assemblage of kinsfolk—all alike unconscious that the whim of fortune would one day shower upon its roof the crowns of kingdoms and of empires, and that it was yet to cradle the race of princes who were to share among them the thrones of a continent.

The excited fancy seeks them in these rooms, and sees them assembled round their mother, children in no respect differing from ordinary children—boys who toil over their Plutarch and their Cæsar, schoolmastered by their grave father, or their granduncle Lucian, and three young sisters who grow up thoughtlessly, and rather wild, like their playmates, in the half-barbarous island-town. There is Joseph, the eldest, and there Napoleon, the second son, with Lucian, Louis, and Jerome; there Caroline, Eliza, and Paulina, the children of a notary of moderate income, who is constantly and to no purpose carrying on lawsuits with the Jesuits of Ajaccio about a contested property, of which, with his large family, he stands in great need. For it is a matter of much anxiety to him, how his children are to be provided for. How will they prosper in the world? and in what way secure for themselves a respectable livelihood?

And lo! these same children one day put forth their hands, one after another, and grasp the mightiest crowns of the earth, tear them from the heads of the most unapproachable majesties of Europe, wear them before all the world, are embraced as brothers and brothers-in-law by emperors and kings, while great nations fall submissive at their feet, and abandon to the sons of the notary of Ajaccio their country, their wealth, and their blood. Napoleon is European Emperor, Joseph king of Spain, Louis king of Holland, Jerome king of Westphalia, Paulina a princess of Italy, Eliza a princess of Italy, Caroline queen of Naples. In this little house were so many crowned potentates born and brought up; their mother a woman whose name the world had never heard, daughter of a citizen of a small, obscure, provincial town, Letitia Ramolino, who married at the age of fourteen a man as little known to fame as herself. It may be said with truth, that in her labours this mother travailed with the world's history.

There is no fable in all the Arabian Nights apparently more fabulous than the story of the Bonaparte family. That this romance has, however, realized itself in the quiet, sober days of our modern era, must be regarded as a great fact in history, and as a piece of great good fortune. The history of humanity, clogged with political precedent, and paralysed by bureaus and red tape, has thereby been shaken with earthquake force into fresh activity, and flushed with a new life, and man has been shown to be stronger than a supposed political necessity. Human power and human passion have been freed from the spell under which the traditional limitations of rank had bound them, and it has been proved that the individual, though born among the dust, may become anything and everything, because men are equal. That the history of the Bonapartes should appear fabulous is the fault of the mediæval tinge that still attaches to our ideas of life, and of the received notions as to the impassable barriers interposed by social difference. Napoleon is the political Faust. His historical greatness does not lie in his battles, but in his revolutionary nature. He overthrew the political gods of tradition. The history of this predestined man is therefore very simple, human, and natural, but it cannot yet be written.

History, too, is Nature. There is a chain of causes and effects, and what we call genius, or a great man, is always the necessary result of definite conditions.

More than a thousand years of almost uninterrupted conflict between Corsica and her oppressors preceded the birth of the great conqueror Napoleon, in whose nature this rock-bound island, and this insular people, steeled in conflict, and forcibly thrown back upon itself by the narrow space to which it was confined, created for themselves an organ whose law was—illimitedness. The ascending series was this: the Corsican bandit, the Corsican soldier, Renuccio della Rocca, Sampiero, Gaffori, Pasquale Paoli, Napoleon.

I entered a little room with blue tapestry, and two windows, one of which, with a balcony before it, looked into a court, the other into the street. You see here a wall-press, behind a tapestried door, and a fireplace with a mantelpiece of yellow marble ornamented with some mythological reliefs. In this room, on the 15th of August 1769, Napoleon was born. It is a strange feeling, hard to put in language, which takes possession of the soul on the spot hallowed as the birthplace of a great man. Something sacred, mystic, a consecrated atmosphere, pervades it. It is as if you were casting a glance behind the curtain of Nature, where she creates in silence the incomprehensible organs of her action. But man discerns only the phenomenal, he attempts in vain to ascertain the _how_. To stand in silence before the unsearchable mysteries of Nature, and see with wonder the radiant forms that ascend from the darkness—that is human religion. For the thoughtful man nothing is more deeply impressive than the starry sky of night, or the starry sky of history. I saw other rooms, the ballroom of the family, Madame Letitia's room, Napoleon's little room where he slept, and that in which he studied. The two little wall-presses are still to be seen there in which his school-books stood. Books stand in them at present. With eager curiosity I took out some of them, as if they were Napoleon's; they were yellow with age—law-books, theological treatises, a Livy, a Guicciardini, and others, probably the property of the Pietra Santa family, who are related to the Bonapartes, and to whom their house in Ajaccio now belongs.

It is well to review in connexion with this house the early history of Napoleon, about which our information is still insufficient. I shall relate what I know of it by hearsay or reading. I am largely indebted to the lately published work of the Corsican Nasica—_Mémoires sur l'Enfance et la Jeunesse de Napoléon jusqu'à l'age de vingt-trois ans_. It is dedicated to the uncle's nephew, and is written without talent or insight, but contains facts which are undoubtedly correct, and some valuable documents.