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These were Morati, a friend of Peraldi, the Paolist deputy; Quenza, more or less neutral, and Grimaldi, a devoted partisan of the Buonapartes.
He was provided with a legal certificate that his family was one of importance and the richest in the department. The Convention had promised compensation to those who had suffered losses. As had been hoped, on their arrival the Buonapartes were treated with every mark of distinction, and ample provision was made for their comfort.
Amongst other sights he was shown the arms of the Buonapartes carved over the gateway of an old house. He was already aware that a branch of his family had been fruitful and multiplied at Florence in days of yore, and that a last descendant of this the ancient race was still alive. This was a certain Canon of San Miniato, now eighty years of age.
At the crisis, Salicetti, a warm friend of the Buonapartes and a high official of the department, appeared with a considerable armed force to maintain order. This cowed the conservatives.
By act of the Convention, women and old men in such circumstances received seventy-five livres a month, infants forty-five livres. Lads received simply a present of twenty-five livres. With the preliminary payment of one hundred and fifty livres, which they promptly received, the Buonapartes were better off than they had been at home.
Politics and private life were alike demoralized by unceasing intrigues; and amidst strifes of Pope and Emperor, duchies and republics, cities and autocrats, there was formed that type of Italian character which is delineated in the pages of Macchiavelli. From the depths of debasement of that cynical age the Buonapartes were saved by their poverty, and by the isolation of their life at Sarzana.
The still unattached captain of artillery, Napoleon Buonaparte, was appointed to the vacant place. As far as history is concerned, this is a very important fact; it is really a matter of slight import whether Cervoni or Salicetti gave the impulse. At the same time his mother received a grant of money, and while favors were going, there were enough needy Buonapartes to receive them.
In Corsica, as in the Forest Cantons of Switzerland and the Highlands of Scotland, class distinctions were by no means so coveted as in lands that had been thoroughly feudalized; and the Buonapartes, content with their civic dignities at Ajaccio and the attachment of their partisans on their country estates, seem rarely to have used the prefix which implied nobility.
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