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'Cuore di querco, cried they, 'bravo Inglese! It was quite a joyous riot. I fancied myself to be a recruiting sea officer. I fancied all my chorus of Corsicans aboard the British fleet. How admirable is the style of all this, equal quite to Goldsmith's best and lightest touch!
This was done with the consent of the majority of the inhabitants; and no transaction between two countries was ever more fairly or legitimately conducted: yet our conduct was unwise; the island is large enough to form an independent state, and such we should have made it, under our protection, as long as protection might be needed; the Corsicans would then have felt as a nation; but when one party had given up the country to England, the natural consequence was that the other looked to France.
So passed the infancy of Mr. Bonaparte, of Corsica. It was, after all, much like the extreme youth of most other children. In everything he undertook he was facile princeps, and in nothing that he said or did is there evidence that he failed to appreciate what lay before him. A visitor to the family once ventured the remark, "I am sorry, Napoleon, for you little Corsicans.
"Do you attach some mysterious meaning to those words?" she asked, coldly. "They mean that I have a dagger, and that I do not fear man's justice. Corsicans explain themselves to God." "And I," said the daughter, rising, "am Ginevra Piombo, and I declare that within six months I shall be the wife of Luigi Porta. You are a tyrant, my father," she added, after a terrifying pause.
In reality Fortune never favoured him more than when she removed him from the coteries of intriguing Corsicans on the coast of Provence and brought him to the centre of all influence. An able schemer at Paris could decide the fate of parties and governments. At the frontiers men could only accept the decrees of the omnipotent capital.
No Corsican was so loathed as the laggard who shrank from avenging the family honour, even on a distant relative of the first offender. The murder of the Duc d'Enghien by Napoleon in 1804 sent a thrill of horror through the Continent. To the Corsicans it seemed little more than an autocratic version of the vendetta traversale.
These words roused no expression of hatred on the part of the two brothers. "Ha! you are no longer Corsicans!" cried Piombo, with a sort of despair. "Farewell. In other days I protected you," he added, in a reproachful tone. "Without me, your mother would never have reached Marseille," he said, addressing himself to Bonaparte, who was silent and thoughtful, his elbow resting on a mantel-shelf.
Who were the "they"? the Corsicans or the Genoese? Paoli's eye was fixed on the acknowledgment of Corsican independence; he was hoodwinked completely as to the treachery in this second section, the meaning of which, according to diplomatic usage, was settled by the interpretation which the language employed for one form put upon that in which the other was written.
Little could the friends of liberty at Paris, or even the statesman himself, have foreseen all the consequences of this action: it softened the feelings of many Corsicans towards their conquerors; above all, it caused the heart of Napoleon Buonaparte for the first time to throb in accord with that of the French nation. His feelings towards Paoli also began to cool.
If there be one human quality that the mountaineer admires above all others, it is "nerve." And what greater display of nerve has been made in this generation than for a few clansmen to shoot down a judge at the bench, the public prosecutor, the sheriff, the clerk of the court, and two jurymen, then take to the mountain laurel like Corsicans to the maquis, and defy the armed power of the country?
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