, hereditary vendettas still
maintained the system of the eleventh century; where the permanent
strife of inimical families was suspended only by truces; where, in many
villages, nobody stirred out of doors except in armed bodies, and
where the houses were crenellated like fortresses. His mother, Laetitia
Ramolini, from whom, in character and in will, he derived much more than
from his father,[1111] is a primitive soul on which Civilization
has taken no hold. She is simple, all of a piece, unsuited to the
refinements, charms, and graces of a worldly life; indifferent to
comforts, without literary culture, as parsimonious as any peasant
woman, but as energetic as the leader of a band. She is powerful,
physically and spiritually, accustomed to danger, ready in desperate
resolutions. She is, in short, a "rural Cornelia," who conceived and
gave birth to her son amidst the risks of battle and of defeat, in the
thickest of the French invasion, amidst mountain rides on horseback,
nocturnal surprises, and volleys of musketry.[1112]

"Losses, privations, and fatigue," says Napoleon, "she endured all and
braved all. Hers was a man's head on a woman's shoulders."

Thus fashioned and brought into the world, he felt that, from first to
the last, he was of his people and country.

"Everything was better there," said he, at Saint Helena,[1113] "even the
very smell of the soil, which he could have detected with his eyes shut;
nowhere had he found the same thing. He imagined himself there again
in early infancy, and lived over again the days of his youth, amidst
precipices, traversing lofty peaks, deep valleys, and narrow defiles,
enjoying the honors and pleasures of hospitality, "treated everywhere
as a brother and compatriot," without any accident or insult ever
suggesting to him that his confidence was not well grounded." At
Bocognano,[1114] where his mother, pregnant with him, had taken
refuge, "where hatred and vengeance extended to the seventh degree of
relationship, and where the dowry of a young girl was estimated by the
number of her Cousins, I was feasted and made welcome, and everybody
would have died for me." Forced to become a Frenchman, transplanted
to France, educated at the expense of the king in a French school, he
became rigid in his insular patriotism, and loudly extolled Paoli, the
liberator, against whom his relations had declared themselves. "Paoli,"
said he, at the dinner table,[1115]" was a great man. He loved