Calling at the _café_ on the Corso, not from choice but by appointment with our “man of the woods,” we find it, as before, dirty, disorderly, and noisy. Where, we ask ourselves, are the gentlemen of Corte? But what has any one, above the classes who toil for a livelihood, to do in Corte, except to lounge the long day under the melancholy elms in the Corso, and wile away the evenings by petty gambling in its wretched _cafés_?
_Pascal Paoli more honoured than Napoleon Buonaparte.—His Memoirs.—George III. King of Corsica.—Remarks on the Union.—Paoli's Death and Tomb._
The suppression of brigandage, security for life and property, the stains of blood washed from the soil, the shame in the face of Europe wiped out,—these are signal benefits which claim from the Corsicans a warmer homage to the younger Napoleon than they ever paid to the first of that name. Not even the honour of having given an emperor to France, a conqueror to continental Europe, enlisted the sympathies, the enthusiasm, of the islanders in the wonderful career of their illustrious countryman. A party, a faction, the Salicete, the Arena, the Bacchiochi, the Abatucci, rallied round him in the first steps of his political life, and the Cervoni, the Sebastiani, soldiers of fortune, of the true Corsican stamp, fought his battles, and were richly rewarded. Some of his countrymen, to their honour, adhered to him to the end, sharing his exile in St. Helena. But the great emperor was never popular in his own country; he neither loved, nor was beloved by, his own people. He did nothing for them, as before remarked, but construct the great national roads; and that was purely a military measure. He left them—designedly, it would seem—to cut one another's throats, and despised them for their barbarism.
Pascal Paoli was, and ever will be, the popular hero of the Corsicans. He fought their last battles for the national independence; moulded their wild aspirations for liberty and self-government into a constitutional form; administered affairs unselfishly, purely, justly; encouraged industry, and checked outrage. He was a man of the people, one of themselves, and he never forgot it; nor have they.
In an Englishman's eyes, Pascal Paoli has the additional merit of having conceived a just idea of the advantage his country would derive from the closest union with the only European power under whose protection a weak State struggling for freedom could hope for repose. He did homage to our principles, and the public feeling was with him in England as well as in Corsica.