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Updated: May 31, 2025
'Touching a nerve' is one of those unforgivable small offences which, in our civilized state, produce the social vendettas and dramas that, with savage nations, spring from the spilling of blood. Instead of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, we demand a nerve for a nerve. 'Thou hast touched me where I am tender thee, too, will I touch.
Tréville and Neville were representatives of the two sides in that, one of the darkest vendettas known in the traditions of Louisiana. The day of the picnic rose brightly. Oh, what a day we passed under those grand trees, on the margin of that clear lake full of every imaginable sort of fish! What various games! What pleasant companions!
The love of plunder, always a characteristic of hill tribes, is fostered by the spectacle of opulence and luxury which, to their eyes, the cities and plains of the south display. A code of honour not less punctilious than that of old Spain, is supported by vendettas as implacable as those of Corsica. In such a state of society, all property is held directly by main force. Every man is a soldier.
His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to Sartene, a Corsican canton par excellence where, in 1800, hereditary vendettas still maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the permanent strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where, in many villages, nobody stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and where the houses were crenellated like fortresses.
They were stolen at night by snaky-haired thieves that crawled on their stomachs under the nose of the sentries; they disappeared mysteriously from armracks; and in the hot weather, when all the doors and windows were open, they vanished like puffs of their own smoke. The border people desired them first for their own family vendettas and then for contingencies.
Frequently a little wooden cross or a heap of stones showed where some traveler had fallen by the wayside, perhaps at the hands of his fellow-man; for the murder rate, thanks largely to drink and vendettas, is high in Honduras.
Her brother had told her of some dreadful vendettas he had known in the Southwest, and how whole families had been divided. Since she had been here she had heard of odd cases of brothers meeting accidentally after long and unaccounted separations; of husbands suddenly confronted with wives they had deserted; of fathers encountering discarded sons!
When at last the terms were published their merciless severity, their disregard of racial boundaries, their creation of hatreds and vendettas which would lead, as sure as the sun should rise, to new warfare, staggered humanity, not only in Germany and Austria, but in every country of the world, where at least minorities of people had hoped for some nobler vision of the world's needs, and for some healing remedy for the evils which had massacred its youth.
It was a land of broils and feuds, of clan enmities and fierce vendettas. Its nobles were half barbarous, and they fought and slashed at one another with drawn dirks almost in the presence of the queen herself. No matter whom she favored, there rose up a swarm of enemies. Here was a Corsica of the north, more savage and untamed than even the other Corsica.
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