ate of Genoa, where,
from father to son, it vegetates obscurely in provincial isolation,
through a long line of notaries and municipal syndics. "My origin,"
says Napoleon himself,[1106] "has made all Italians regard me as a
compatriot.... When the question of the marriage of my sister Pauline
with Prince Borghese came up there was but one voice in Rome and in
Tuscany, in that family, and with all its connections: 'It will
do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves, it is one of our own
families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about coming to Paris to
crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave prevailed against
the Austrian party by supporting political arguments with the following
slight tribute to national amour propre: 'After all we are imposing
an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them. We are revenging
ourselves on the Gauls.'" Significant words, which will one day throw
light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the eldest daughter of
modern civilization, imbued with her right of primogeniture, persisting
in her grudge against the transalpines, the rancorous inheritor of Roman
pride and of antique patriotism.[1107]

From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes
himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken and
subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de Medici,
then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under Spanish rule,
municipal independence, private feuds, the great exploits of political
adventures and successful usurpations, the system of ephemeral
principalities, based on force and fraud, all give way to permanent
repression, monarchical discipline, external order, and a certain
species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time when the energy
and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle Ages begins to
run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,[1108] a small detached
branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but almost barbarous,
amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging to the primitive
medieval epoch,[1109] and in a social atmosphere sufficiently rude for
the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.--Grafted, moreover, by
frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the island, Napoleon, on the
maternal side, through his grandmother and mother, is wholly indigenous.
His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa, belonged to Sartene,[1110] a Corsican
canton par excellence where, in 1800