Chap. VI
Leave Bastia.—The Road.—View of Elba, Pianosa, and Monte-Cristo.—The Littorale.—An Adventure.
—The Stagna di Biguglia.
The Corsicans are apt to say, that the national roads were the only benefit Napoleon conferred on his native country. Like all his great works of construction, they are worthy of his genius. One of these traverses the whole eastern coast of the island from Bastia, by Cervione and Porto-Vecchio, to Bonifaccio. Another line branches off near Vescovato, about ten miles from Bastia, and following the valley of the Golo, is carried among the mountains to Corte, whence it is continued through a wild and mountainous district to Ajaccio. Similar engineering skill is displayed in its continuation on the western side of the mountains to Sartene, and thence to Bonifaccio, where it also terminates.
On clearing Bastia, we found ourselves on this high road,—a magnificent causeway carried nearly in a straight line for many miles through the plain extending between the sea and the mountains. Orange groves embowering sheltered nooks in the environs of the town, and hedges of the Indian fig (cactus opuntia), betokened the warmth of this southern shore; and, as we advanced, the rank growth of vegetation on the flats realised all we had heard of the teeming richness of the littorale. It was hot walking, and the causeway and flats would have been monotonous enough but for the glorious views on either hand.
To the left, the Mediterranean was calmly subsiding from the effects of the gale, its undulations still sparkling in the sunbeams. Far within the horizon was the group of islands which lend a charm to all this coast, and are associated with great historical names. There rises Elba, with the sharp outline of its lofty peaks and dark shores, too narrow for the mighty spirit which ere long burst the bounds of his Empire Island. Far away in the southern hemisphere I had visited that other island, where the chains were riveted too firmly for release, except by the grave over which I had pondered. Now we stood on the soil that gave him birth. Why was not this the “Island Empire?” The Allied Sovereigns were disposed to be magnanimous. It was offered to him; why did he refuse it? Was it that, with far-sighted policy, he considered Corsica too bright a gem in the crown of France for him to pluck, without sooner or later giving umbrage to the Bourbons? May his refusal be cited as a further proof of the little love he bore for the land of his birth? Or was it that, when once hurled from the throne of his creation, the conqueror of kingdoms could not descend to compare one petty island with another? “At Elba he found the horizon, the sky, the air, the waves of his childhood; and the history of his island-state, would be to him a constant lesson of the mutability of human things.”3
Napoleon emperor in Corsica! On this spot, with Elba in view, one dwells for a moment on the idea! Then, indeed, Corsica’s long-cherished dreams of national independence—it was her last chance—would have been strangely realised. But her fate was sealed. She had sunk to the rank of an outlying department of France, and so remained; with what results we may perhaps discover.
Near Elba, and strongly contrasting with its bold outline, lies the little island of Pianosa, the ancient Planosa. Its surface is flat, as the name indicates. That island, too, has its tale of imperial exile. The young Agrippa, grandson of Augustus, and heir-presumptive to an empire wider than that of Napoleon’s most ambitious dreams, was banished to Planosa by his grandfather, at the instance of Livia. Augustus is said to have visited him there. It was Agrippa’s fate to find a grave, as well as a prison, in the Mediterranean island; the tyrant Tiberius, with the jealousy of an eastern monarch, having caused his rival to be strangled on his own accession to the empire.
Soon after Napoleon’s arrival in Elba he sent some troops to take possession of Pianosa; which, ravaged by the Genoese in the thirteenth century, had never since flourished. The fallen emperor himself could not help laughing at this mighty expedition, for which thirty of his guards, some Elban militia, and six pieces of artillery were detailed; exclaiming, as he gave orders to erect batteries and fire upon any enemies who might present themselves, “Europe will say that I have already made a conquest.” Napoleon partially restored the fortifications of an old castle, which had been bombarded by an English squadron, landing the marines, in 1809, during the revolutionary war. The island now belongs, with Elba, to the Grand-Duke of Tuscany.
Further to the south appears the rocky island of Monte-Cristo. This, too, has its tale of exile, insignificant as it looks except for its sharply serrated outline, and a worldwide fame. The emperor Diocletian banished here St. Mamilian, Archbishop of Palermo. A convent was afterwards founded on the site of the Saint’s rude cell. The monks of Monte-Cristo flourished, as they deserved; the worthy fathers having founded many hospitals in Tuscany and done much good. Saracen corsairs carried off the monks; the convent was laid in ruins; and the lone island remained uninhabited for a long course of years, except by wild goats. It was in this state when Alexandre Dumas made it the scene of his hero’s successful adventure after his escape from the Château d’If, and adopted it as the title of his popular novel. The island having been recently purchased and colonised by Mr. Watson Taylor, he has built a house on it for his own residence.
It is about nine miles in circumference, and I should judge from its appearance that the greatest part of the surface is rocky, though not without green hollows, dells, and verdant slopes. But the olive and the vine usually thrive, and are largely cultivated, on such spots; and if, as I should imagine, the natural vegetation and the climate are similar to those of the other islands in the Tuscan sea with which we are acquainted, happy may the lord of Monte-Cristo be; for, in the hands of a wealthy English gentleman, such a spot may be made an earthly paradise.
After about an hour’s walk we halted for the muleteer to come up. A glorious point of view it was, embracing a wide expanse of the bright sea, with the islands which had supplied so many striking and pleasant recollections. Looking backward, the purple mountains of Capo Corso now appeared massed together in endless variety of outline, with Bastia at their base, the citadel and white houses glowing in the evening sunshine. Turning to the right, the eye caught the fine effect of the meeting of the plain and mountains—the interminable level, stretching far away till it was lost in distance, and teeming with luxuriant vegetation, but with only here and there a solitary clump of trees,—and the long mountain-range line after line rising into peaks above the gracefully rounded hills that swelled up from the level of the plain. Woods, orchards, vineyards overspread the lower slopes, the hollows were buried in thickets of evergreen, and picturesque villages and towers appeared, though rarely, on the summits of the hills.
Who would not linger at the sight of Furiani, the most important of these villages, its ivy-mantled towers crumbling to ruins?—Furiani, where the Corsicans, in a national assembly, first organised their insurrection against the Genoese, and elected the prudent and intrepid Giaffori one of their leaders; with cries of “Evviva la libertà! evviva il popolo!”—Furiani, where, in almost their last struggle, two hundred Corsicans held the fortifications long after they were a heap of ruins, and at length cut their way by night to the shore.
The muleteer at last made his appearance with his sorry cavalcade, and my companion having taken advantage of our halt to make the sketch of the “Meeting of the mountains and plain,” which was not quite finished, that we might not lose time, as the sun was descending behind the mountains, one of the mules was tied to a stake, in order that my friend might overtake us, while we made the best of our way forward.
I still preferred walking, and pushed on at a pace which suited none of my company, human or asinine. We had got ahead about a mile, when shouts from behind opened a scene perfectly ludicrous. There was the little mule trotting up the road at most unusual speed, impelled by my friend’s shouts and the big stones with which he was pelting the miserable beast. He too came up at a long trot, rather excited, and calling to the muleteer, “Catch your mule, Giovanni! I’ll have nothing more to do with the brute.”
“What is it all about?”
It appeared that my friend, having finished his sketch, prepared to mount and push after us. The mule, however, had a design diametrically opposed to this. No sooner was it loosed from the stake to which it was tied, than the poor beast very naturally felt a strong impulse to return to its stable at Bastia. Could instinct have forewarned it what it would have to encounter before midnight, the retrograde impulse would have been still stronger. Every one knows how difficult it is to deal with a mule when it is in the mood either not to go at all, or to go the wrong way. Having driven a team of these animals—fine Calabrian mules they were, equal to the best Spanish—all the way from Naples to Dieppe, I can boast of some experience in the mulish temperament.
To make matters worse, the English saddle being all too large for its wizened sides, in spite of all our care in knotting the girths, it twisted round in the attempt to mount, and my very excellent friend—no disparagement to his noble horsemanship, for one has no firm seat even when mounted on a vicious pony—before he could bring the saddle to a level and gain his equilibrium, was fairly pitched over the side of the road. Mule having now achieved that glorious libertà, the instinctive aspiration of Corsican existence, whether man, mule, or moufflon, started forward alone, my friend following, I have no doubt, in rather a thundering rage.
“At every attempt I made to take the mule by the head”—such was his account—“he reversed his position, and launched his heels at me with a viciousness that rendered the enterprise not a little dangerous, for I do not know anything so funky as an ass’s heels. Had it not been for saving the saddle, mule might have taken himself off to Bastia, or a worse place, for any trouble I would have taken to stop him.”
It may be supposed that this story was not told or listened to without shouts of laughter, the muleteer being the only one of the party who was seriously disconcerted.
“Andiamo, Giovanni,” said I, cutting short all discussion, and moved forward. We had lost time, and the evening was closing in.
“Won’t you ride, then?—try the other mule.”
“No, I thank you; I am not in the least fatigued, and have no desire to be pitched into a bush of prickly cactus, or rolled down the bank of the causeway.”
“Let us push on, then; if we are belated, we may have worse adventures, this first day of our rambles in Corsica, before we get to our night’s quarters; and where we are to find them, I am sure I have no idea.”
We walked on at a smart pace, and gradually drew far ahead of Giovanni and his mules. They were not to be hurried, and if they had been gifted like Balaam’s ass, I imagine they would have agreed with Giovanni in wishing l’Inglesi all’Inferno. I don’t know, speaking from experience, which is worst, riding, leading, or driving a malcontent mule.
The rays of the setting sun were now faintly gleaming on a vast sheet of shallow stagnant water, the Stagna di Biguglia, between the road and the sea, from which it is only separated by a low strip of alluvial soil. It was a solitary, a melancholy scene. A luxuriant growth of reeds fringes the margin of the lagoon, and heat and moisture combine to throw up a rank vegetation on its marshy banks. The peasants fly from its pestiferous exhalations, and nothing is heard or seen but the plash of the fish in the still waters, the sharp cry of the heron and gull, wheeling and hovering till they dart on their prey, and some rude fisherman’s boat piled with baskets of eels for the market at Bastia.
This vast sheet of water was formerly open to the sea, forming a noble harbour, in which floated the galleys of the powerful republics that in the middle ages disputed the empire of the Mediterranean and the possession of its islands. On a hill above stood the town of Biguglia, the capital of the island under the Pisans and Genoese, till in the fourteenth century Henri della Rocca, with the insurgent Corsicans, carried it by assault. The Genoese then erected the fortress at Bastia, which, with the town growing up under its protection, became the chief seat of their power in the island, and Biguglia fell to decay.
Mariana, a Roman colony, stood on the coast near the lower extremity of this present lagoon; and Aleria, another still further south, on the sea-line of the great plain extending for forty miles below Bastia. Our proposed route led in another direction, and, not to interrupt the thread of the narrative, a notice of these colonies is reserved for another opportunity.
We had reached the neighbourhood at which, according to calculation, we ought to strike off from the high-road towards the mountains. Now, if ever, a guide was needed; but Giovanni and his mules had fallen far in the rear. A by-road turned to the right, apparently in the desired direction. At the angle of the roads we took counsel,—should we venture to take the by-path, or wait till Giovanni came up?—which involved a loss of time we could ill spare at that period of the day. A mistake might be awkward, but we had carefully studied the bearings of the country on our maps, and deciding to risk it, struck boldly into the lane. For a short distance it led between inclosures, but presently opened, and we found ourselves on the boundless waste, with only a narrow track for our guidance through its mazes. We were in the bush, the Macchia as the natives call it.