CHAPTER VI.

NAPOLEON'S LATEST ACTIVITY IN CORSICA.

In the year 1790, two battalions were to be formed in Corsica, the soldiers being allowed to name their _chefs_ themselves. It is worth noticing on this occasion, how the subsequent Cæsar, Napoleon, holds it for the highest honour, and an almost unattainable piece of good fortune, to become _chef_ of a battalion. The difficulties were as great as the energy of the young candidate. The most influential men of Ajaccio were opposed to him, Cuneo, Ludovico Ornano, Ugo Peretti, Matias Pozzo di Borgo, and the rich Marius Peraldi. Peraldi laughed at Napoleon, ridiculed his personal appearance, his diminutive stature, his limited prospects. This made Napoleon furious, and he challenged him. Peraldi agreed to a duel. His rival waited for him till nightfall at the little Chapel of the Greeks, walking restlessly up and down; but Peraldi did not make his appearance; his family had found means to prevent the duel.

The wanderer who now takes his way to the Chapel of the Greeks, to enjoy from it the beautiful view of the city and gulf, sees above him, on the rocks of the shore, a little Ionic temple. I asked what it meant, and was told it was the tomb of the Peraldi. Marius, the rival of Napoleon for a Major's commission, lies buried there. His family has left behind it no other reputation than that of having been one of the wealthiest in Corsica.

Madame Letitia sacrificed half her fortune to procure her favourite son the command of the battalion. Her house was constantly open to Napoleon's numerous party, her table always covered. Mattresses lay constantly ready in the rooms and in the passages, to receive his armed adherents during the night. It was as if the house were in a state of defence from the Vendetta. Matters looked threatening. Napoleon was never so excited as at this period; he could not sleep at night, during the day he wandered restlessly through the rooms, or deliberated with the Abbé Fesch and his partisans. He was pale and abstracted; his eyes full of fire, his soul full of passion. Perhaps he approached the consulship and the empire more calmly than the rank of major in the National Guard of Ajaccio.

The commissary, who was to conduct the election, had arrived, and was lodging in the house of the Peraldi. This was alarming. It was resolved, therefore, on the 18th Brumaire, to have recourse to stratagem. The partisans of Napoleon arm themselves; one of these—the fierce and reckless Bagaglino, armed to the teeth—forces his way at night into the house of the Peraldi, where the family are sitting at supper with the commissary. "Madame Letitia wishes to speak with you," cries Bagaglino threateningly; "and immediately!" The commissary follows him, the Peraldi not venturing to detain their guest; who, carried off by the Napoleonists, is compelled to quarter himself in the Casa Bonaparte, under the pretext that with the Peraldi he was not free. This little _coup d'état_ shows us Napoleon complete.

The Casa Bonaparte now held itself ready for an assault; but Peraldi made no attempt. The day of the election came, and the people assembled in the Church of San Francesco. A disturbance arose, Geronimo Pozzo di Borgo was torn from the pulpit, and with difficulty rescued. The result of the election was this: Quenza, a Bonapartist, was made first _chef_—Napoleon, the second. The victory was almost complete, and the unattainable all but attained; Napoleon was second in command of a battalion.

Napoleon lived henceforth only among his soldiers, and he was the soul of his battalion. He now made his practical military studies before engaging in actual warfare, as he had received his political schooling in the clubs. Meanwhile, the irritation between the national battalion and the aristocrats and citizens—the latter worked upon by the priests—grew stronger every day. After seeing the highland Corsicans of the present time, one can form some idea of the nature and appearance of that Quenza-Napoleon battalion. The citizens of Ajaccio may not have dreaded this troop of Montagnards in the process of training altogether groundlessly. On Easter-day, of the year 1792, open hostilities commenced between the battalion and the inhabitants of Ajaccio. The struggle began on the Place du Diamant; the fighting lasted several days, and a great deal of blood was shed, neither the civil authorities nor the military commandant, Maillard, interfering. Napoleon escaped without injury. When quiet was re-established, he drew up a justification, in the name of the battalion, and addressed it to the Department, to the Minister of War, and the Legislative. Three commissaries hereupon appeared in Ajaccio; they returned a favourable report as to the conduct of the battalion, but it was removed from the town. Napoleon went to Corte, where Paoli received him coldly.

In May of the same year, he made a journey to Paris to bring his sister Eliza from St. Cyr. The changes in the political world took him here by surprise, and shattered all the hopes of military promotion which he had thought to realize in Paris. This is said to have produced so powerful an effect on the passionate nature of the young Corsican, as to make him entertain thoughts of suicide. He freed himself from them in a dialogue on self-murder. Napoleon left Paris soon after the frightful 2d of September, and returned to Corsica.

While Dumouriez, therefore, was astonishing the world with the first military achievements of the young Republic, the man who was destined to give new shape to Europe, was exerting himself in the wild Corsica, to make head against the cabals of his opponents—himself forming counter-cabals, and daily exposing his life to the dagger-thrust and the musket-ball. Arrived again in Corte, Paoli received him austerely. The paths of the two had completely separated; for another ambition was now stirring in the soul of the young Napoleon than to tread in the footsteps of the noble patriot. Had he done so—had his heart remained warm for the freedom of Corsica, then perhaps a wild goat-herd, as he pointed out to me some spot among the hills associated with a tale of blood, would have said: "See, it was here the Corsican patriot-leader, Napoleon Bonaparte, fell; he was almost as great as Sampiero."

Paoli gave Napoleon orders to proceed to Bonifazio, and join the expedition against Sardinia. Napoleon obeyed murmuringly. He remained eight months in Bonifazio, to make the necessary preparations, as far as they had been committed to him. On the 22d of January, the day after the execution of Louis Capet, Napoleon almost lost his life in Bonifazio. Some marines—a furious rabble from Marseilles—had landed, and commenced a quarrel with the Corsican battalion; and when Napoleon hastened up to prevent bloodshed, they received him with shouts of _ça ira!_ cried out that he was an aristocrat, and, rushing in upon him, would have hung him on the lamp-post, had not the Maire, the people, and the soldiers succeeded in putting them to flight.

The enterprise upon Sardinia, of which Truguet was commander-in-chief, undertaken with a view to frighten the court of Turin, proved utterly futile. It is affirmed that Paoli had a share in its ill success. It is true that he had sent a thousand of his National Guards, under the command of his most trusted friend, Colonna Cesari; but, as the latter himself afterwards admitted, he had said to him: "Remember, O Cesari! that Sardinia is the natural ally of our island; that it has, under all circumstances, supplied us with victuals and ammunition, and that the King of Piedmont has ever been the friend of the Corsicans and their cause." The squadron, under the command of Colonna, at length left the harbour of Bonifazio, and made sail for the island of Santa Maddalena. Napoleon was next in command under Colonna, and was intrusted with the artillery. The young officer burned with impatience; it was his first deed of arms. He was one of the foremost to jump ashore, and he threw, with his own hand, a fireball into the little town of Maddalena. But the admirable measures he had taken proved completely fruitless; the Sardinians made a sortie; Colonna immediately ordered the retreat to be sounded.

The young Napoleon wept for rage; he made the most vehement representations to Colonna, and when the latter listened to him with cool indifference, Napoleon turned to some officers, and said, "He does not understand me." "You are an impudent fellow!" thundered Colonna to him. The born soldier knew his duty, was silent, and placed himself at his post. "He is a parade-horse, and nothing more," said he afterwards. Napoleon's first expedition was thus unfortunate, discreditable—a retreat.

On his return to Bonifazio, he learned that Paoli, who now saw himself compelled to throw off the mask, had dissolved the Quenza battalion. This occurred in the spring of 1793, about the time that the Convention sent Saliceti, Delcher, and Lacombe, to the island as commissaries. Lucian Bonaparte and Bartolommeo Arena had denounced Paoli. But Napoleon had no part in this denunciation; the memory of his father, and his own generous spirit, led him, on the contrary, to defend his great countryman. He himself wrote an apology for Paoli, and sent it to the Convention—an action that does him honour. This remarkable document has been preserved, though in a somewhat defective state. We have the defence, it appears to me, as Napoleon first threw it off, previously to giving it a complete form.

NAPOLEON'S LETTER TO THE CONVENTION.

"REPRESENTATIVES!—You are the true organs of the people's sovereignty. All your decrees are dictated by the nation, or receive their effect immediately from the nation. Every one of your laws is a benefit, and earns for you a new claim on the gratitude of posterity, which owes to you the Republic, and on that of the world, which will date from you its freedom.

"A single decree that you have passed has greatly disheartened the city of Ajaccio; that which commands a feeble gray-haired man of seventy to drag himself to your bar, and place himself for a moment beside the impious mover of sedition or the venal self-seeker.

"Paoli a mover of sedition, or an ambitious man?

"Seditious! and with what object? To revenge himself on the family of the Bourbons, whose _perfidious policy_ overwhelmed his country with calamity, and _forced himself into banishment_. But was not the end of their tyranny also the end of his exile; and have you not already appeased his wrath—if he still cherished it—by the blood of Louis?

"Seditious! and with what object? To restore the aristocracy of the nobles and the priests? He who, since his thirteenth year ... he who was no sooner at the head of affairs than he destroyed _feudalism_, and knew no other distinction than that of the citizen; he who, thirty years ago, fought against Rome, and was _excommunicated_,[M] who made himself master of the estates of the bishops to give them away, to Venice ... in Italy....

"Seditious! and with what object? To deliver Corsica into the hands of England? he who would not deliver it to France, despite the efforts of Chauvelin, who did not spare titles nor marks of favour!

"Give Corsica to England! What would he gain by living in the mire of London? Why did he not remain there when he was banished?

"Paoli a self-seeker! If Paoli is a self-seeker, _what more can he desire_? He is the object of his people's affection, and they refuse him nothing; _he is at the head of the army_; he is on the eve of the day when he must defend the island against a foreign attack.

"If Paoli was ambitious, then he has gained everything by the Republic; and if he has showed himself an adherent of ... since the Constituent Assembly, what should he do now, _when the people is everything_?

"Paoli ambitious! Representatives! when the French were governed by a corrupt court, when men believed neither in virtue nor in love of country, then certainly it might have been said that Paoli was ambitious. _We made war against the tyrants; it is to be supposed that that was not from love of country and of liberty, but from the ambition of our leaders!_ In Coblenz, Paoli must be considered as ambitious; but in Paris—_the centre of French freedom_—Paoli, if people know him well, must be accounted the patriarch of the French Republic; _posterity will think thus_—the people think thus. Follow my advice, silence calumny, and the utterly corrupt men who use it as their instrument. Representatives! Paoli is more than a grayhaired man of threescore and ten—he is infirm. Otherwise he would have gone to your bar to crush his enemies. _We owe him everything_—even the happiness of being a French Republic. He enjoys our constant trust. Revoke, as concerns him, your decree of the 2d of April, and restore joy to this whole people."...

Soon after this, however, the young revolutionist completely quarrelled with Paoli; they became deadly enemies. The aged patriot found in the young man the most violent adversary, not of his person, but of his ideas. It is said that Paoli did not quite know him at that time, and had hinted to him that it was his intention to separate Corsica from France, and effect a connexion with England, that the indignant Napoleon did not conceal his anger, and that Paoli hereupon flew into a furious passion, and conceived the most violent hatred for his opponent. Pasquale's adherents were numerous, and the fortress of Ajaccio was in the hands of his friend Colonna. Paoli and Pozzo di Borgo, then procurator-general, cited before the Convention, defied the summons, and lived now under the ban of the Convention, and at open war with France.

The three representatives now made Napoleon Inspector-general of Corsican Artillery, and instructed him to reduce the citadel of Ajaccio. He attempted it, but all his exertions to conquer the fortress of his native town were in vain. Destiny had planted no laurels for Napoleon in Corsica. During the siege, his life was on one occasion in extreme danger. He had occupied the Tower of Capitello with about fifty men, in order to operate from that point by land, while the vessels of war carried on the bombardment from the sea. A storm blew the fleet out of the gulf, and Napoleon remained cut off from it in the tower, where he had to defend himself for three days, living on horse-flesh, till some herdsmen from the mountains freed him from his perilous situation, and he succeeded in reaching the fleet.

Much disconcerted, he was proceeding to Bastia by land. On the way, however, he learned that his life was threatened, that Marius Peraldi had instigated the people to seize him, and put him into the hands of Paoli, who meant to shoot him as soon as he had him in his power. In Vivario he was concealed by the parish priest; in Bocognano his friends rescued him with the greatest difficulty from the fury of the people; during the night, he escaped through the window from the chamber in which he had hid himself, and at length reached Ajaccio in safety. Here again, however, menaced still more seriously, he fled from his house to a grotto near the Chapel of the Greeks, where he remained concealed for a night. His friends now conveyed him safely on board a vessel, and he reached Bastia by sea. The fury of the Paolists was meanwhile directed upon Napoleon's family. Madame Letitia, terrified at the symptoms of approaching danger, fled with her children to Milelli, accompanied by some trusty peasants of Bastelica and Bocognano. Louis, Eliza, Paulina, and the Abbé Fesch were with her; Jerome and Caroline remained in concealment with the Ramolinos. Still insecure in Milelli, the persecuted family fled during the night to the shore in the vicinity of the Tower of Capitello, to await there the arrival of the French fleet, which had been announced as on its way to reduce the citadel of Ajaccio. The flight through the rugged hill-country was difficult and fatiguing; for there are no paths in that region but over the rocks, through the macchia, and over the mountain-torrents. Madame Letitia held little Paulina by the hand, Fesch preceded with Eliza and Louis; a troop of adherents from Bastelica, the birthplace of Sampiero, marched in advance, and behind them the men of Bocognano, armed with daggers, muskets, and pistols. The family of Napoleon wandering thus through the mountains, reached at length, after great exertions—clambering over rocks, and wading through streams—the shore at Capitello, where they all concealed themselves in the woods.

About this time Napoleon had thrown himself on board a small vessel in Bastia, had out-sailed the French fleet, and landed at Isola Rossa, where many of the herdsmen of his family have their pasturing-grounds. Here learning that his relatives were in flight, he sent shepherds out in all directions to seek for them, and passed the night waiting in the most painful suspense for news. Morning dawned; he was sitting under a rock, anxiously pondering the fate of his friends. Suddenly a herdsman rushed up to him, crying, "Save yourself!" A band of men from Ajaccio, in quest of Bonaparte and his family, was hastening towards him. Napoleon sprang into the sea. His little vessel, a _chebeque_, kept his pursuers off by its fire, and the boat it had immediately lowered took him safely on board.

On the same day Bonaparte sailed into the gulf, and keeping close in shore, he saw people making signals to be taken off. These were his mother Letitia and her children.

The suffering family was conveyed with all speed to Calvi, where hospitable entertainers were found. But the house of the Bonapartes, in Ajaccio, had been entered and plundered by the furious mob. The family owed its rescue entirely to the prudence and foresight of the Corsican Costa, to whom Napoleon in his will bequeathed the sum of 100,000 francs in acknowledgment of the service.

The young Bonaparte himself, called away from a fruitless attempt upon Ajaccio, in which he was not supported by the fleet, also sailed to Calvi; and leaving Corsica from this point, he appears again at Toulon.

Pasquale Paoli himself had thus driven him out into European history. Two men, bitter enemies of each other—Marbœuf and Paoli—that is, despotism and democracy, had guided Napoleon to his special career. When Napoleon became consul, and his star shone the Cynosure of the world, the star of Paoli had long since set. Deeply does it move me when I think of the noble old Pasquale living in forgotten and solitary exile in London, and illuminating his house in unselfish joy, when he hears of the dignity to which his countryman has attained, forgetting his grudge, and hoping that the great Corsican may become a blessing to humanity. In one of his letters, he says: "Napoleon has consummated our Vendetta on all those that were the authors of our fall. I only wish he may remember his country." He remained in banishment; Napoleon did not recall him, perhaps because he feared to excite the jealousy of the French.

In the days of his prosperity, Bonaparte forgot his little fatherland; thankless and weak, like all _parvenus_, who are unwilling to be reminded of the obscure spot that gave them birth. He did nothing for the poor island, and the Corsicans have not been able to forget this. They still remember that the Emperor, when a Corsican once presented himself to him, drily asked him: "Well, how is it in Corsica; are the Corsicans always murdering each other yet?"

He visited his native island only once after that flight from Calvi—on his return from Egypt. On the 29th of September 1799, his ship ran into the harbour of Ajaccio; with him were Murat, who was yet to leave this same harbour under very changed circumstances—Eugene, Berthier, Lannes, Andreosi, Louis Bonaparte, Morge, and Berthollet. He sat there on board, and read the journals during the night and great part of the next day. He was unwilling to land; but his officers were curious to become acquainted with his birthplace, and he at length yielded to their solicitations, and those of the citizens of Ajaccio. A man, who had in his boyhood been one of the spectators of this landing, gave me an account of it. "Look you," said he, "this Place du Diamant was covered with a huzzaing crowd, and the people filled the roofs; they wanted to see the wonderful man, who, a few years before, had walked about these streets a simple officer, and one of the leading democrats of Ajaccio. He alighted at the Casa Bonaparte, and came out afterwards and walked in the Place du Diamant. But I must tell you of a circumstance that does him honour. When Napoleon lived in Ajaccio, the priests and aristocrats were his bitter enemies. He was one day returning to his house, and had arrived just at the corner of this street, when he saw a priest, a relation of my own, standing at the window of yonder house, and levelling a musket at him. Napoleon bent himself that moment, and the ball whizzed over his head into the wall behind;—a moment sooner, and the world would never have seen an Emperor Napoleon. Well, General Bonaparte met that priest on the Place du Diamant. The man, well remembering that he had once shot at him, turned off to one side. But Napoleon saw him, stepped up to him, gave him his hand, and reminded him good-humouredly of old times. Look you, he was no Corsican in that; great men readily forget injuries." Napoleon, however, was a thorough Corsican when he had the Duke of Enghien shot. This deed was the deed of a Corsican bandit, and can only be rightly understood when we know what the custom of the Vendetta in Corsica allows—the murder even of innocent members of an enemy's family. Napoleon could not quite disown his Corsican temperament; and thus we find him romantic, theatrical, adventurous, as the Corsicans in a certain degree are. Egypt, Russia, Elba, are passages in his history in which he was nothing but a great and genial adventurer.

He went out shooting on occasion of that visit to Ajaccio, and spent a day in Milelli, where he wrote the pamphlet against Buttafucco. How many wonderful deeds lay already behind him! how many princes and peoples had the might of his sword and the thunder of his phrases already overthrown! He called his herdsmen about him, and richly rewarded that Bagaglino who had aided him in carrying out his first _coup d'état_. He distributed his herds and his lands. His nurse, too, Camilla Ilari, came to see him: she embraced him weeping; and as she presented him with a flask of milk she had brought, said in her _naïve_ and simple way: "My son, I gave you the milk of my heart—take now the milk of my goat." Napoleon gave her a comfortable house in Ajaccio, and a large extent of arable land; and when he became Emperor, he added a pension of 3600 francs. After remaining six days in Corsica, he again sailed from Ajaccio for France.

He never afterwards visited his native island; but fate one day gave him a sight of it, when, a defeated man, whom history had laid aside as no longer available for its aims, he stood upon the narrow cliff of Elba. Then ironic destiny showed him the obscure corner from which, as a child of fortune, he had issued into the world to seek a career.

Later, on St. Helena, his thoughts constantly recurred to Corsica. People on their deathbeds usually wander back in imagination through the course of their lives, and dwell with greatest pleasure on their childhood. He spoke a great deal of his native island. In the Commentaries, he says on one occasion: "My good Corsicans were not contented with me in the time of the Consulate and the Empire. They affirmed I had done little for my country.... Those who hated me, and still more those who envied me, were continually on the watch; all that I did for my Corsicans was cried down as a theft and an injustice to the French. This necessary policy had turned away the hearts of my countrymen from me, and made them cold towards me. I pity them, but I could not act otherwise. When the Corsicans saw me unfortunate, abused by many an ungrateful Frenchman—when they saw all Europe in conspiracy against me, they forgot all, like men of steadfast and incorruptible virtue, and were ready to sacrifice themselves for me if I had wished.... What memories Corsica has left me! I think with joy still on its fair regions, on its mountains; I remember still the fragrance that it exhales. I should have bettered the lot of my beautiful Corsica, I should have made my fellow-countrymen happy; but days of misfortune came, and I have not been able to carry out my plans."

The first question that Napoleon put to the Corsican Antommarchi, his physician, when he entered his room in St. Helena, was: "Have you a Filippini?" Many of his countrymen had been his companions throughout his career; he had raised many to elevated stations—Bacciocchi, Arena, Cervioni, Arrighi, Saliceti, Casabianca, Abbatucci, Sebastiani. His relation to that Colonna who had been the friend of Paoli, and who had once been hostile to him, was to the last one of intimate friendship. It is said that Paoli had commissioned Colonna to lay an ambuscade for Napoleon near Ajaccio, and take him alive or dead; such, at least, is the report. Colonna refused. He remained the friend of both, of Napoleon as well as Paoli—and that without playing the hypocrite, for he was a high-spirited man. He was the first who knew of Napoleon's flight from Elba; and in the will which he made in St. Helena, the Emperor intrusted to him the charge of his mother. Colonna discharged this trust conscientiously, and till Letitia's death remained with her as her friend and manager of her affairs. He then retired to Vico, near Ajaccio.

The dying Napoleon received extreme unction from the hands of a Corsican, the priest Vignale, who was afterwards murdered in his native island. He died thus among brother Corsicans, who had not forsaken him.