many an ungrateful Frenchman, and Europe conspiring against me, they forgot every thing, like men of firm and uncorrupted virtue, and declared themselves ready to sacrifice themselves for me if I had willed it. . . . What reminiscences has Corsica left me! I still think with delight of its beautiful scenes and its mountains; I still remember the fragrance its air exhales. I would have improved the lot of my beautiful Corsica, I would have made my fellow-citizens happy, but the downfall came, and I could not carry out my plans." The first question Napoleon put to his Corsican physician, Antommarchi, when he entered his room in St. Helena, was, "Have you a Filippini?" Many of his island countrymen had accompanied him in his career; and many he had promoted. Bacciochi, Arena, Cervoni, Arrighi, Saliceti, Casabianca, Abbatucci, and Sebastiani. With the same Colonna, who had been Paoli's friend and had formerly opposed him, he stood on terms of intimate friendship until his death. They say Paoli had charged him to lay an ambush for young Napoleon, near Ajaccio, and to bring him alive or dead: well, they say so. Colonna refused. He continued a friend to both parties, Paoli as well as Napoleon, without hypocrisy, for he was a noble-minded man. He was the first who knew of Napoleon's flight from Elba, and to him Napoleon in his will confided the care of his mother. Colonna undertook this duty conscientiously, and remained with Letitia till her death, as her friend and major-domo. He afterwards retired to Vico, near Ajaccio. From the hand of a Corsican, Napoleon, when dying, received extreme unction in St. Helena; this priest was Vignale, who was afterwards murdered in Corsica. Thus Napoleon died among his brother countrymen, who did not desert him. CHAPTER VII. TWO COFFINS. Ah! where is now the greatest monarch's throne? FIRDUSI. WHILST I pictured to myself the history of Napoleon, his brilliant empire, the nations and the princes whom this precipitate planet attracted to his court, and the flood of events and destinies that he cast over the world, I was overcome, in his now desolate and deathly silent house, by a feeling of sadness and of satisfaction at once. All those immense passions, which insatiably devoured half the world, where are they now, and where is their influence still felt? They are like a dream, like a great fable told by nurse Time to her children. Thanks be to Time! She is the silent, mysterious power that levels all again, even heaven-towering potentates. She is the salutary ostracism, the true potsherd justice. Where is Napoleon? what is left of him? A name, and a relic which is now openly adored by an easily dazzled nation. What has now been taking place beyond the Rhine, appears to me like Napoleon's funeral celebration of the year 1821. But the dead rise not again. After the gods came the ghosts, and after the world's tragedy comes the Satyric drama.-A cadaverous smell has gone out into the world since they have raised up a dead man there beyond the Rhine. I went from Letitia's house to the chapel of her tomb. The street of the "King of Rome" leads to the cathedral of Ajaccio. This church is a heavy building with a simple façade, above the portal of which an expunged coat-of-arms may be seen. Doubtless it was the arms of the extinct republic of Genoa. The interior of the church is gay, and rather rustic. Heavy pillars divide it into three naves; the dome is small, as well as the gallery. On the right of the choir is a small chapel hung with black, Two coffins covered with black velvet stand in it before an altar, which is decked out quite in village fashion. At the head and foot of each coffin there are heavy wooden candelabra set up, and a constant lamp-extinguished, however-hangs above each. On the coffin to the left hand lies a cardinal's hat and a garland of everlastings. These are the coffins of Madame Letitia and Cardinal Fesch. They were brought hither in the year 1851 from their Italian graves. Letitia died on the 2nd February, 1836, in her Roman palace on the Venetian Square, and her coffin stood from that time to this in a church of the small town Corneto, near Rome, No marble, no work of art, no sepulchral pomp—nothing adorns the spot where a woman is buried who bore an emperor, three kings, and three princesses ! I was surprised by the unconscious irony, and the profound tragic significance embodied in this almost rustic simplicity of Letitia's sepulchral chapel. It resembles a princely grave composed of theatre scenes. Her coffin rests on a high wooden trestle; the inelegant candelabra are of wood too, and the gold is tinsel. The hangings of the chapel seem to be velvet, but they are of common taffeta, and the long silver fringes to them are of silvered paper. That golden Imperial crown on the coffin is of wood, with tinsel pasted over it. Only Letitia's garland of everlastings is genuine. They told me this sepulchral chapel was provisional, and that a new cathedral is to be built, with a beautiful vault for Letitia. There will be no hurry about that, the Corsicans being so poor; and I should be sorry for it, too. The honest citizens of Ajaccio know not how deep a meaning they have illustrated. What a philosophy of life speaks from this chapel! What were the crowns, after all, which Letitia of Ajaccio and her children wore? For one short evening they were princes; then they hastily threw off the purple and the sceptre, and disappeared, as if nothing had happened. Therefore has history herself placed the tinsel crown upon the coffin of Letitia Ramolino, the citizen's daughter. Let it lie; it is not less beautiful though it be false, like the fortune of the bastard kings whom this woman bore. Never since the world has been, has a mother's heart beaten more passionately than that of the woman in this coffin. She saw her children one after another on the high sunlit pinnacle of human glory, and one after the other saw them fall. paid the debt of destiny. She has Yea, truly-one who stands by this coffin has difficulty to command his emotions; so painfully touching and so great a tragedy of a mother's heart lies buried in it. What an unmerited destiny! And how came it that, in the womb of such a cheerful, simple young wife, such world-wide, historical forces, such men and nation-absorbing powers, were destined to come to maturity? CHAPTER VIII. POZZO DI BORGO. THE house in the Rue Napoléon in which the exile Murat lived, is transformed into a palace. The arms above the door tell that it belongs to the family of Pozzo di Borgo. Next to the Bonapartes the Pozzo di Borgos are the most celebrated family of Ajaccio, being of ancient nobility, and known in Corsica long before the former. In the sixteenth century they distinguished themselves in the service of Venice. The Corsican poet, Biagino di Leca, who celebrates the deeds of Alfonso Ornano, in his epic “Il D'Ornano Marte," extols at the same time several Pozzo di Borgos, and predicts immortal glory to their race. The family at least gained a European celebrity through Count Carlo Andrea Pozzo di Borgo, the friend of Napoleon's youth, Paoli's friend, and the inexorable Corsican hater of the emperor. He was born March 8, 1768, at Alata, a village near Ajaccio. He studied law at Pisa, like Carlo Bonaparte, and then played a part in Corsica, first as a Democrat and Revolutionist, and subsequently as a Paolist. In the year 1791 he was the deputy for Ajaccio, and afterwards attorney-general, and Paoli's righthaud man. When Corsica attached itself to England, this dexterous man became president of the Corsican Council of State under Elliot's viceroyalty. They say that his diplomacy brought his patron Paoli into discredit with the English, in order to make his own influence solely felt. He subsequently left Corsica, and went several times to London, to Vienna, to Russia, to Constantinople, and to Syria; passing through the world and its courts, like Sampiero of old, this inexorable enemy unceasingly stirred up the hatred of cabinets against Napoleon. Alexander made him a Russian counsellor of state in the year 1802. Napoleon pursued him with equal hatred, and longed to get into his power this terrible foe, who crossed him in all his courses. After the peace of Pressburg, he demanded his extradition. Had he gained it, he would have done with Pozzo di Borgo as Charles XII. did with Patkul. An extraordinary thing is this hostility; it is regular Corsican vendetta, Corsican hatred transferred to the history of the world, Pozzo di Borgo it was who determined Bernadotte to act against Napoleon; it was he who instigated the allies to a rapid march against Paris; it was he who set aside the King of Rome, and who, at the congress of Vienna, urged them to banish Napoleon from the dangerous Elba to a far more distant island. At Waterloo he stood with arms in his hands against his great adversary, and was wounded. And when his gigantic foe was for ever humbled at St. Helena, the diplomatist, in the feeling of satiated revenge, spoke the proud and terrible words, "I have not killed Napoleon, but I have cast the last spadeful of earth upon him!" Pozzo di Borgo earned the coronet of a Russian count, and the honour of being the permanent representative of all the Russias at the court of France. Living at Paris, he generally opposed the reaction, and was thrown into a position of difference with the courts in consequence. Notwithstanding his career, he was and ever remained a Corsican. I was told that he never put off his national ways. He loved his native land. One might almost say that, even in withdrawing the gratitude of his countrymen from Napoleon to himself, he was carrying on his feud with Napoleon. Napoleon did nothing for Corsica; Pozzo di Borgo a great deal. He instituted the publication of the two Corsican historians, Filippini and Peter, and Gregori dedicated to him a collection of the statutes. Pozzo di Borgo's name thus appears on the three greatest documents of Corsican history, and is indelible. His beneficence to his countrymen, in charitable institutions and alms, was great, as was his fortune. He died as a private citizen at Paris, Feb. 15, 1842, at the age of seventyfour, ill at ease with the world, internally worn out, and mentally diseased. He was one of the most skilful diplomatists and acutest heads of this century. His immense fortune went to his nephews, who have bought large estates near Ajaccio. One of them was murdered a few years ago in the vicinity of the town. He was manager of the |