nt times; and its effects are still visible in the life of the
stern islanders. In his charming romance, "Colomba," M. Prosper
Merimee 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, Jerome, "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 h