The Life of Napoleon I | Page 5

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. Yet the embassies discharged at
intervals by the more talented members of the family showed that the
gifts for intrigue were only dormant; and they were certainly
transmitted in their intensity to the greatest scion of the race.
In the year 1529 Francis Buonaparte, whether pressed by poverty or
distracted by despair at the misfortunes which then overwhelmed Italy,
migrated to Corsica. There the family was grafted upon a tougher
branch of the Italian race. To the vulpine characteristics developed
under the shadow of the Medici there were now added qualities of a
more virile stamp. Though dominated in turn by the masters of the
Mediterranean, by Carthaginians, Romans, Vandals, by the men of Pisa,
and finally by the Genoese Republic, the islanders retained a striking
individuality. The rock-bound coast and mountainous interior helped to
preserve the essential features of primitive life. Foreign Powers might
affect the towns on the sea-board, but they left the clans of the interior
comparatively untouched. Their life centred around the family. The
Government counted for little or nothing; for was it not the symbol of
the detested foreign rule? Its laws were therefore as naught when they
conflicted with the unwritten but omnipotent code of family honour. A
slight inflicted on a neighbour would call forth the warning
words--"Guard thyself: I am on my guard." Forthwith there began a
blood feud, a vendetta, which frequently dragged on its dreary course
through generations of conspiracy and murder, until, the principals
having vanished, the collateral branches of the families were involved.
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.[1]
The vendetta was the chief law of Corsican society up to comparatively
recent times; and its effects are still visible in the life of the stern
islanders. In his charming romance, "Colomba," M. Prosper Mérimée
has depicted the typical Corsican, even of the towns, as preoccupied,
gloomy, suspicious, ever on the alert, hovering about his dwelling, like
a falcon over his nest, seemingly in preparation for attack or defence.
Laughter, the song, the dance, were rarely heard in the streets; for the
women, after acting as the drudges of the household, were kept
jealously at home, while their lords smoked and watched. If a game at
hazard were ventured upon, it ran its course in silence, which not
seldom was broken by the shot or the stab--first warning that there had
been underhand play. The deed always preceded the word.
In such a life, where commerce and agriculture were despised, where
woman was mainly a drudge and man a conspirator, there grew up the
typical Corsican temperament, moody and exacting, but withal keen,
brave, and constant, which looked on the world as a fencing-school for
the glorification of the family and the clan[2]. Of this type Napoleon
was to be the supreme exemplar; and the fates granted him as an arena
a chaotic France and a distracted Europe.
Amidst that grim Corsican existence the Buonapartes passed their lives
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Occupied as advocates
and lawyers with such details of the law as were of any practical
importance, they must have been involved in family feuds and the
oft-recurring disputes between Corsica and the suzerain Power, Genoa.
As became dignitaries in the municipality of Ajaccio, several of the
Buonapartes espoused the Genoese side; and the Genoese Senate in a
document of the year 1652 styled one of them, Jérome, "Egregius
Hieronimus di Buonaparte, procurator Nobilium." These distinctions
they seem to have little coveted. Very few families belonged to the
Corsican noblesse, and their fiefs were unimportant. 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. Their life was not unlike that of many an old Scottish laird,
who, though possibly bourgeois in origin, yet by courtesy ranked as
chieftain among his tenants, and was ennobled by the parlance of the
countryside, perhaps all the more readily because he refused to wear
the honours that came from over the Border.
But a new influence was now to call forth