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Updated: August 14, 2024
After the last fiasco before the citadel of Ajaccio, the situation of the Buonapartes was momentarily desperate.
To regain, if possible, some of his lost influence in the island, Buonaparte had already renewed communication with former acquaintances in Ajaccio. In a letter written immediately after his release in September, 1794, to the Corsican deputy Multedo, he informed his correspondent that his birthplace was the weakest spot on the island, and open to attack. The information was correct.
He was appointed provisionally to the command of a battalion of National Guards; and the first military service on which he was employed was the reduction of a small fortress, called the Torre di Capitello, near Ajaccio.
Three young princes, grandsons of Louis XV., who were to be successively upon the throne of France, were at Versailles: Louis the Dauphin, now twenty, and his Austrian bride, Marie Antoinette, and his two brothers, afterward successively Louis XVIII. and Charles X. Still another princeling, Louis Philippe, was at the Palais Royal, son of the Duke of Orleans, late regent, also destined to wear the French crown; and last of all that infant at Ajaccio, in whom the play was to reach its splendid climax.
Many a battle royal he had fought because of her with the fun-loving boys of Ajaccio, who found that it enraged Napoleon to tease him about the little girl, and therefore never let the opportunity slip to tease and torment him. "Ah, Napoleon, it is you!" cried Panoria, as the boy approached her. "And what great stories have you been telling yourself today in your grotto?"
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.
With these irreconcilables Charles Buonaparte did not cast in his lot, but accepted the pardon offered to those who should recognize the French sway. With his wife and their little child Joseph he returned to Ajaccio; and there, shortly afterwards, Napoleon was born.
What say you to that?" "Oh, very well, very well," said old Nonesuch, as if he made a great concession; "if you say so from your own knowledge, if you insist that he was born, let it go so. I admit that he was born. But as to his being dead, eh? Will you insist on that too?" "And why not?" replied the Corsican, still harping on his personal knowledge of things in Ajaccio.
Every now and then the little girls would stop their flower-picking to cool off; for, though the August sun was hot, the western breezes came fresh across the wide Gulf of Ajaccio, down to whose shores ran broad and beautiful avenues of chestnut-trees, through which one could catch a glimpse, like a beautiful picture, of the little island of Sanguinarie, three miles away from shore.
Meanwhile, Villeneuve's squadron, after getting from under the shelter of the land into the open sea, lost some of their spars and sails, and one vessel, it is recorded, was dismasted, which means, in seafaring interpretation, that all her masts were carried away; as she succeeded, however, in getting into Ajaccio, she can only have lost her royal topgallant, and possibly a topmast or two.
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