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"A man who had met with a misfortune might live there peacefully for ten years, and no gendarme or soldier would ever come to look for him. The woods run into the Vizzavona forest, and anybody who had friends at Bocognano or in the neighbourhood would want for nothing. That's a good gun you have there. It must carry a long way. Blood of the Madonna! What calibre!
In no landscape are more various qualities combined; in none are they so harmonised as to produce so strong a sense of majestic freedom and severe power. Suppose that we are on the road to Corte, and have now reached Bocognano, the first considerable village since we left Ajaccio.
But I think there are thirty kilometres in him yet." As he spoke he had his hand in his pocket. "Here," he said. "Take some money. Get a better horse at Vivario and follow me. It will be daylight in an hour. Tell me again the names of the places on the road." "Vivario, Bocognano, Bastelica, Cauro, Sartene, Bonifacio," repeated Jean, like a lesson.
He sets out secretly, with a trusty shepherd as companion, to cross the island: but at the village of Bocognano he is recognized and imprisoned by the partisans of Paoli. Some of the villagers, however, retain their old affection to the Buonaparte family, which here has an ancestral estate, and secretly set him free.
These licences, moreover, are only granted for short and precisely measured periods. In order to appreciate the stern and gloomy character of the Corsicans, it is necessary to leave the smiling gardens of Ajaccio, and to visit some of the more distant mountain villages Vico, Cavro, Bastelica, or Bocognano, any of which may easily be reached from the capital.
In point of scenery and situation it is hardly second to any of these mountain-girdled cities; but its poverty and bareness are scarcely less striking than those of Bocognano. The whole Corsican character, with its stern love of justice, its furious revengefulness and wild passion for freedom, seems to be illustrated by the peculiar elements of grandeur and desolation in this landscape.
The horse, as he had told Jean, was still fresh enough, and gained new energy as the air grew lighter. The mountain town of Bocognano lies below the road, and the scent of burning pinewood told that the peasants were astir. Here de Vasselot quitted the highway, and took a side-road to Bastelica.
But I should very much like to know what objection that Englishman could have to the marriage. Are there any corporals in England?" After a somewhat lengthy ride, spent in talking in this fashion, the brother and sister reached a little village, not far from Bocognano, where they halted to dine and sleep at a friend's house.
While we read their turbid lines we are carried in imagination to one of the cheerless houses of Bastelica or Bocognano, overshadowed by its mournful chestnut-tree, on which the blood of the murdered man is yet red. The gridata, or wake, is assembled in a dark room.
You have but to follow the track over the mountains due south you know the stars, you, who are a cavalry officer until you join the Corte road at Ponte Alle Leccia, then there is but the one road to Bocognano. If you overtake your poor father, you have but to detain him until Jean comes up. You may trust Jean to bring him safely back to the yacht here as arranged.
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