a new and friendly commission
of two members started for Corsica. But at Marseilles they fell into
the hands of the Jacobin mob, and were arrested. Ignorant of these
favorable events, and the untoward circumstances by which their effect
was thwarted, the disheartened statesman had written and forwarded on
May fourteenth a second letter, of the same tenor as the first. This
measure likewise had failed of effect, for the messenger had been
stopped at Bastia, now the focus of Salicetti's influence, and the
letter had never reached its destination.

It was probably in this interval that Paoli finally adopted, as a last
desperate resort, the hitherto hazy idea of putting the island under
English protection, in order to maintain himself in the mission to
which he felt that Providence had called him. The actual departure of
Napoleon's expedition from St. Florent gave the final impulse. That
event so inflamed the passions of the conservative party in Ajaccio
that the Buonaparte family could no longer think of returning within a
reasonable time to their home. Some desperate resolution must be
taken, though it should involve leaving their small estates to be
ravaged, their slender resources to be destroyed, and abandoning their
partizans to proscription and imprisonment. They finally found a
temporary asylum with a relative in Calvi. The attacking flotilla had
been detained nearly a week by a storm, and reached Ajaccio on May
twenty-ninth, in the very height of these turmoils. It was too late
for any possibility of success. The few French troops on shore were
cowed, and dared not show themselves when a party landed from the
ships. On the contrary, Napoleon and his volunteers were received with
a fire of musketry, and, after spending two anxious days in an
outlying tower which they had seized and held, were glad to reembark
and sail away. Their leader, after still another narrow escape from
seizure, rejoined his family at Calvi. The Jacobin commission held a
meeting, and determined to send Salicetti to justify their course at
Paris. He carried with him a wordy paper written by Buonaparte in his
worst style and spelling, setting forth the military and political
situation in Corsica, and containing a bitter tirade against Paoli,
which remains to lend some color to the charge that the writer had
been, since his leader's return from exile, a spy and an informer,
influenced by no high principle of patriotism, but only by a base
ambit