Читать книгу Napoleon - Vincent Cronin - Страница 9

IN October 1791 Napoleon returned to Ajaccio on leave, exchanging gun drill and cramped billets for the friendly, spacious house in Via Malerba, French for Italian, café meals for the ravioli and macaroni he missed in France. The wine grapes were ripening, the mountain shrubs still had that sweet scent Napoleon said he could recognize anywhere. The surroundings were the same, but everyone was a little older.

Napoleon found his mother in her seventh year of widowhood. She was still beautiful and had declined two offers to re-marry, wishing to remain faithful to the memory of Carlo and to devote herself fully to her children. As a widow she always wore black. Instead of three servants she could now afford only one, a woman called Saveriana, who insisted on staying, though paid only a nominal three francs a month. Letizia had so much housework that for a time she could no longer fulfil her self-imposed vow of going to daily Mass.

Joseph was a quietly intelligent young man of twenty-three, a qualified lawyer interested in politics and soon to become a member of Ajaccio council. Lucien was aged sixteen. During his brothers’ absence at school he had been made a fuss of; the return of Joseph, and of Napoleon on periods of leave, made Lucien somewhat resentful and acerbated an already prickly character; he was a vigorous speaker, however, and soon to be the orator of the family. Marie Anne, aged fourteen, was absent at Saint-Cyr. Louis, whom Napoleon brought home with him, was thirteen, a good-looking, affectionate, unusually scrupulous boy. Pauline, eleven, was a lively charmer, who felt everything deeply yet had a sense of fun – she was Napoleon’s favourite sister. Caroline, who was nine and fair-complexioned, had a gift for music. The last of Letizia’s thirteen children, of whom eight had survived, was Jerome, a cocky, somewhat spoiled little show-off.

To his family Napoleon, sword at hip, was a respected figure, the only Buonaparte earning a regular income. He was of average height by French standards, but shorter than most Corsican men, and very slim – he barely filled out his blue uniform with red facings. He had a lean angular face with a very pronounced jaw; his eyes were bluish-grey, his complexion olive. He had spent two previous leaves at home, but those had been periods of tranquillity when he had read Corneille and Voltaire aloud with Joseph and taken his mother, who still suffered from stiffness in her left side, to the iron-rich waters of Guagno. His present leave was to be much less serene.

Also in the house was Archdeacon Lucciano, now in his seventy-sixth year and confined by gout to bed, where he continued to do a highly profitable business in farms, wine, horses, wheat and pigs. He was also extremely litigious: in one year he had appeared in court on five separate occasions. Usually he won his cases and he became very rich. For safety he kept his money – gold coins, all of it – in his mattress.

The rest of the family, by contrast, were very poor. Carlo had signed a favourable contract with the French Government to produce 10,000 young mulberry trees for silk. During his boyhood the mulberry had been a symbol of future Buonaparte riches – hence Napoleon’s apostrophe of the mulberry tree at Brienne. But now it stood for disaster because the French Government had cancelled the contract, leaving the Buonapartes stuck with many thousands of young mulberry trees not even useful for their fruit, since this species bore an insipid white berry scorned in an island of grapes and cherries. Letizia was 3,800 livres out of pocket. But Lucciano would not help. Nothing would make him part with a penny.

When money was badly needed, Pauline the charmer was delegated to go up to the old man and, while playing around, to try to extract a gold louis or two out of his mattress. One day, as she went about it awkwardly, the whole bag fell with a clatter on the tiled floor. Speechless for a moment, the Archdeacon soon roused the house with his cries. Letizia ran up and found him staring, outraged, at his treasured hoard scattered on the floor. He swore ‘by all the saints in heaven’ that none of the gold was his: he was only keeping it for friends or clients. Letizia silently picked up the coins. The Archdeacon counted them, put them back in the bag, and replaced the bag in his mattress.

Napoleon liked his great-uncle despite his avarice, and would talk to him by the hour. He was sorry to see him ill and, wondering how he could be of help, recalled a Swiss doctor named Samuel Tissot, the first medical man to suggest that sick people should treat themselves. Tissot had published three famous books, one on Onanism, in which he warned that masturbation could lead to madness, another on the disorders of people of fashion, for which he prescribed fresh air, exercise and a vegetable diet, and a third on diseases incidental to literary and sedentary persons, for which he prescribed walking, cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel and chervil. In the second book, being a staunch republican, Tissot put in a good word for Paoli. That was enough to make Napoleon’s eyes light up: he believed Tissot was a kindred spirit, and wrote a letter ‘To Monsieur Tissot, Doctor of Medicine, Fellow of the Royal Society, residing in Lausanne’.

‘Humanity, sir,’ Napoleon began, ‘leads me to hope that you will deign to reply to this unusual consultation. I myself for the last month have been suffering from tertian fever, which makes me doubtful whether you can read this scribble.’ Having thus excused his handwriting, which was seldom good, with or without fever, Napoleon then described his great-uncle’s symptoms, explained that he had practically never been ill before, and even added his own diagnosis: ‘I believe that he has a tendency to egoism and that being comfortably off he has not been obliged to develop all his energies.’ Respectfully, but with assurance, he asked Dr Tissot to prescribe by return of post. As it happened, Tissot had already given a remedy for gout in the first of his ‘treat yourself’ books: bathing the legs, a largely milk diet, no sweets, no oil, no ragouts, no wine. Perhaps he felt that he had nothing further to say, for he wrote on the back of Napoleon’s request: ‘A letter of little interest; no reply sent.’

Olive oil, of course, is a staple of Corsican diet. For that reason or another Archdeacon Lucciano grew steadily worse, and in late autumn 1791 the end was plainly near. His family gathered round the old man’s bed, with the crucifix hanging above and the mattress of gold, while the Archdeacon addressed a last word to the older boys. ‘You, Joseph, will be head of the family, and you, Napoleon, will be a man.’ The Archdeacon meant that he had discerned in the second son those virtues of energy, courage and independence which to a Corsican comprised true manhood.

With the Archdeacon’s death his property passed to Letizia’s sons. Overnight the Buonapartes found themselves no longer poor, but quite well-off. This was a stroke of luck for Napoleon, because he wanted to play a part in Corsican politics, a rough world where one did not get far without the influence which comes from money.

Corsica was sharply divided between those who welcomed the Constitution of 1791, and those who opposed the new measures from Paris, particularly measures against the Church. Napoleon belonged to the first group, and furthermore believed that only a strong National Guard, or citizens’ army, could implement the Constitution and bring its benefits to the Corsican people. He campaigned for a National Guard, and when it was formed, wrote to the War Office, explaining that his ‘post of honour’ now lay in Corsica, and asking permission, which was granted, to stand for election to one of two places as lieutenant-colonel in the second battalion.

There were four candidates and each Guard had two votes. A fortnight before the election Napoleon arranged for 200 Guards to come to Ajaccio and lodge in the Casa Buonaparte and its grounds. There Letizia gave them plenty of good things to eat and drink – paying with the Archdeacon’s gold.

On election eve the commissioners arrived. Everyone watched to see where they would lodge, for it was thus that they indicated their preferences. One of them, Morati, went to the house of a family backing Napoleon’s chief rival, Pozzo. Napoleon did not relish Morati lodging there, and perhaps being intimidated. He called one of his men and ordered him to kidnap Morati. That evening, when the Peraldi were seated at dinner, intruders burst into the dining-room, seized Morati and brought him to Napoleon’s house. There the astonished commissioner had to spend the night.

Next day the 521 Guards trooped into the church of San Francesco. Pozzo made a speech protesting against the kidnapping. But the Guards hissed, and with shouts of ‘Abasso’ pulled Pozzo off the platform; some whipped out stilettos. Just in time Napoleon and a friend intervened and made a rampart round Pozzo. Then quiet was restored and voting began. Napoleon came second with 422 votes. By Corsican standards it had been a surprisingly calm election – no one killed.

Napoleon was now, at twenty-two, a lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard. But he found himself in a troubled situation. Paris had decreed the suppression of all religious houses. In Corsica there were sixty-five friaries, the one in Ajaccio being particularly important. In March it had been closed. Naturally the Franciscans protested and, being well-liked, managed to rouse support.

A week after Napoleon’s election, on Easter Sunday 1792, a group of non-juring priests – those who refused to swear loyalty to the Constitution – entered the closed-down friary and celebrated Mass. Napoleon decided the priests were defying the Government and alerted his Guards. After the Mass a game of skittles began; a dispute arose, which soon became a battle between supporters of the friars and supporters of the Constitutional clergy, between the old order and the new. Stilettos flashed, pistols blazed. Napoleon ordered his Guards to restore quiet. Suddenly, near the cathedral, one of the friars’ supporters pulled out a pistol and Lieutenant Rocca della Sera of the National Guard fell dead. Napoleon rushed up, carried the body back to his headquarters in the tower of the seminary, and decided to fight it out with the friars’ supporters.

The key to Ajaccio was its citadel, a powerful fortress with sheer walls and big guns. Whoever held the citadel held Ajaccio. But Colonel Maillard, the commander there, showed no disposition to help Napoleon. Instead, he sent French troops to clear the town. Napoleon, in the seminary, declined to be cleared and at times, in the narrow streets, French troops and Napoleon’s men were blazing away at each other.

Napoleon went to see Maillard. His men were exhausted, and he asked if they might rest in the citadel. Maillard refused. Then give us some ammunition, said Napoleon, we’re running short. Again Maillard said no. Napoleon considered these replies an act of defiance of the people’s army, and the citadel, with its guns trained on the town, another Bastille. Quitting Maillard abruptly, he went round Ajaccio calling for volunteers to storm the citadel. But no one would listen: they were concerned with the friary, not the fortress. Finally Napoleon led his Guards, short of ammunition and exhausted by a day and two nights of fighting, against the citadel, and the attack failed.

On Easter Wednesday Pietri and Arrighi, the Corsican civilians responsible for the National Guard, arrived in Ajaccio. ‘This is a conspiracy hatched and fomented by religion,’ Napoleon told them. He was right, but failed to add that the mass of Corsicans clung to their traditional religious ways. Pietri and Arrighi calmed down the Ajaccians, put thirty-four in prison, and sent Napoleon’s battalion to Corte, three days’ march away.

This was a blow to Napoleon. It left Ajaccio in the hands of Colonel Maillard, it isolated him from his family, his friends and his chosen political arena; it seemed also to condone, as he put it, ‘the Ajaccians’ resistance to a law passed by the freely elected Assembly’. Still more unfortunate was the fact that Maillard sent an angry report to Lejard, the Minister of War, blaming Napoleon, a French officer, for taking arms against a French garrison. Napoleon, he said, should be court-martialled.

‘It seems urgent that you go to France,’ Joseph told Napoleon in considerable alarm, and Napoleon thought so too. At all costs he must clear himself of Maillard’s charges. He said goodbye to his family, caught the boat from Bastia and on 28 May arrived in Paris

The Revolution had now entered a new phase. It had become an international conflict: the kings and aristocracy of Europe against the people of France. The Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia had declared war on the French people, had invaded French soil and had promised to restore the old régime. The deeper they advanced, the more nervous and edgy Parisians became. They suspected Louis XVI of conniving with his fellow kings; they suspected their Austrian-born queen. Their fears might have been quelled by Mirabeau, but Mirabeau had died the year before, and now there was no one to calm the frightened, angry crowds who marched and protested and looted.

Napoleon spent his days visiting the War Office, listening to debates in the Assembly, looking up friends and studying the mood of the people. He ran short of money and had to pawn his watch. On 20 June he was lunching near the Palais Royal with Antoine de Bourrienne, an old friend from the Ecole Militaire who had forsaken the army for law. Suddenly they saw a crowd of ragged men arrive from the direction of the food markets, evidently heading for the Assembly building. They numbered between five and six thousand, and were armed with pikes, axes, swords, muskets and pointed sticks. Some wore red bonnets, and were therefore Jacobins of the extreme Left. They were shouting abuse at Brissot’s moderate Government. ‘Let’s follow this rabble,’ said Napoleon.

The rabble reached the Assembly building, where Napoleon watched them demand admission. For an hour, singing the revolutionary song ‘Ça ira’, and waving a plank to which was nailed a bloody ox-heart with the inscription, ‘Cœur de Louis XVI’, they filed through the hall. Then they marched to the Tuileries Palace, chanting coarse slogans, and climbed the wide seventeenth-century staircase to the royal apartments. There looked like being bloodshed. But the King received them graciously, consented to let them stick a red bonnet on his head, and to drink a glass of wine with them. For two hours he stayed with them, while they shouted and demonstrated, then, reassured, they drifted away. ‘The King came out of it well,’ Napoleon wrote to Joseph, ‘… but an incident like this is unconstitutional and a very dangerous example.’

Dangerous it soon proved. On 9 August Jacobins invaded the galleries and heckled the Government, which, as the Austro-Prussian army pressed on, was steadily losing its grip. ‘The noise and disorder were excessive,’ wrote an English eyewitness, Dr Moore. ‘Fifty members were vociferating at once: I never was witness to a scene so tumultuous; the bell, as well as the voice of the President, was drowned in a storm, compared to which the most boisterous night I ever was witness to in the House of Commons, was calm.’

Next morning, 10 August, crowds roamed the streets. It was a blazing hot day and tempers were frayed. Leaving his hotel, Napoleon went to a house in the Place du Carrousel where Bourrienne’s brother kept a pawnshop – with Napoleon’s watch among the pawned articles. From the windows he had a view of the Tuileries, and of the crowd beginning to form in front of it, no longer only Parisians but National Guardsmen fresh from the provinces, chiefly Brittany and Marseille. The latter were chanting the Marseillaise, fresh from the pen of Rouget de Lisle; this anthem, perhaps the most stirring ever written, made provincials and Parisians feel a common cause and a new strength.

Louis XVI appeared outside the palace. The crowd booed and shouted insults. Louis went in again. He wanted to stay in the palace but Roederer, a young lawyer whose advice he trusted, begged him to go, with the Queen and his children, to the Assembly. This he did. The National Guardsmen then broke into the palace forecourt, and firing started – no one knew who fired the first shot. As the Swiss Guard resisted, the crowd brought up cannon to the Pont Royal and started shelling the palace. Hoping to avert bloodshed, the King sent orders to his Swiss Guards to cease fire. At this the National Guardsmen swarmed in almost unopposed, broke down doors with axes, and killed whoever they found, mainly courtiers and Swiss Guards.

About noon Napoleon crossed to the forecourt, now a great pool of blood where 800 men lay dead or dying. He was sickened to see respectable-looking women perpetrating outrages on dead Swiss Guardsmen. He also saw men from Marseille killing in cold blood. As one of them pointed his musket at a wounded Swiss Guard, Napoleon intervened. ‘You’re from the south? So am I. Let’s save this wretch.’ The Marseillais, either from shame or pity, dropped his musket, and on that day of blood one life at least was saved.

While the crowd drifted away, laden with Marie Antoinette’s jewels, silver and dresses, Napoleon went to the nearby cafés, scanning people’s faces. He read on them only anger and hatred. What had become of the generous ideals, the sense of law and justice and fraternity, which had launched the Revolution?

That hot August day Napoleon learned a lesson he was never to forget: that once leadership breaks down, even the most generous ideals go awry. Still a firm believer in constitutional monarchy, he felt that the leadership should have come from the King. To Joseph that evening he wrote: ‘If Louis XVI had shown himself on horseback, victory would have been his.’

Napoleon meanwhile was going regularly to the War Office. He explained his conduct in Ajaccio so satisfactorily that the idea of a court-martial was dropped. His keenness to bring the benefits of the Revolution to Corsica made a very favourable impression. Not only was he allowed to return to his command, with 352 livres for travelling expenses, but he was raised a rank in the regular army. From the last day of August he would be Captain Buonaparte.

This triumph was followed by a new worry. On 16 August the school of Saint-Cyr, aristocratic and therefore undesirable, was officially closed. For Napoleon this was alarming news, because Marie Anne was a pupil there. As soon as he had finished at the War Office Napoleon hurried to Saint-Cyr to fetch the sister he had not seen for eight years. She was now aged fifteen, not very pretty, but intelligent, self-composed and given to the rather stilted language taught at Saint-Cyr. Her school uniform was a black dress, black stockings and black gloves: on her breast a cross spangled with fleurs-de-lys, the figure of Christ on one side, of St Louis on the other. This emblem Napoleon doubtless eyed with considerable unease: in France’s present mood it was enough to get his sister strung up on one of the street lanternes.

Napoleon took Marie Anne to Paris and booked two places in the stage coach for Marseille a week ahead. While waiting, perhaps to celebrate his new captaincy, he took her to the Opera. Marie Anne had been taught that opera was indecent and the work of the devil. At first she scrupulously shut her eyes tight, but presently Napoleon noticed that she had opened them and was enjoying the new experience.

All the while power was passing to the Jacobins. They were out for the blood of aristocrats and priests. On 7 September mobs broke into the Paris prisons and massacred over one thousand innocent men and women. Before the month was out they were to throw Louis Capet into the Temple gaol and declare France a Republic.

Two days after the terrible massacre in Paris, Napoleon and Marie Anne boarded the stage coach. All the way across France the girl with the Saint-Cyr accent and manners made a bad impression on the Jacobin crowds, and when she climbed down from the coach in Marseille a threatening group pointed to her feathered taffeta bonnet: ‘Aristocrats! Death to the aristocrats!’ ‘We’re no more aristocrats than you!’ retorted Captain Buonaparte, and snatching the feathered bonnet from her head, threw it to the crowd, who cheered.

In October 1792 Napoleon was back in Ajaccio, his personal position enhanced, glad to be out of the Paris blood-bath. He resumed his post as lieutenant-colonel in the second battalion of the Corsican National Guard. But his role now was a new one, because the Revolution had entered yet another phase. In September at Valmy the French won a victory over the Austro-Prussians. Valmy turned the tide of war. All the pent-up energy unleashed by the new Constitution was now directed against the external enemies of the French people: the kings and noblemen and reactionary bishops who had dared to send armies into France. Not only did the French fight back, they carried the war on to enemy soil. They invaded Belgium, an Austrian possession, threatened Holland – thereby alarming England, and seized Savoy and Nice from King Victor Amadeus of Piedmont, an ally of Austria.

The French Revolution had taken the offensive. A patriot – and Napoleon wished above all to be a patriot – was no longer a man who brought to his fellows the benefits of the Constitution, but one who fought in the front line against an enemy bent on suppressing those benefits. A friend of Napoleon’s, Antonio Cristoforo Saliceti, who sat in the Convention (as the new Assembly called itself), rammed the point home in a letter to him. France was at war with King Victor Amadeus, and the King’s possessions included Sardinia. Why hadn’t the Corsican National Guard seen action in that area? The Convention was ill-pleased with the Corsicans’ feeble efforts in defence of the people’s liberty. To Napoleon Saliceti’s message was clear. If Corsica wished to continue to be identified with France, she must march against the common enemy.

Paoli had returned to Corsica, where he headed the government. He was not eager to attack Sardinia, perhaps bringing reprisals, but he did consent to strike a blow against the Sardinian off-shore islets of Maddalena and Caprera. Napoleon ensured that he and his battalion were chosen for this patriotic expedition. Inhabited by Corsican-speaking shepherds and fishermen, the eleven islands had been occupied for twenty-five years by Sardinia, and though of small intrinsic value, would be useful stepping-stones.

On 18 February 1793, Napoleon and his senior colleague, Colonel Quenza embarked 800 men of the National Guard, two 12-pounders and one mortar in the naval corvette, Fauvette. She was manned by Marseille desperadoes, who had already won a bad name by getting drunk in Ajaccio and killing three Corsicans. Command of the expedition had been entrusted by Paoli to his friend Colonna Cesari.

Napoleon was eager as only a young officer can be on the eve of his first engagement. During the stormy four-day voyage it was noticed that he was scrupulous about fulfilling orders to the last detail, and that he dictated his own orders fast. He had taken along a dressing-case with fittings of silver marked with his initials, and every morning washed himself with a wet sponge.

At four in the afternoon of 22 February, protected by fire from the Fauvette, Napoleon and Quenza landed on the tiny island of San Stefano, within range of Maddalena. They met musket-fire from a small Sardinian garrison and lost one man wounded. Quickly they occupied the whole island save for a square tower where the Sardinians took refuge. Napoleon trained his guns on Maddalena to cover the landing he supposed Cesari would at once make. But Cesari refused to land that night. Napoleon pleaded. Cesari still refused. As Napoleon wrote in his report, ‘We lost the favourable moment which in war decides everything.’

For two nights and a day, in a high wind and drenching rain, Napoleon waited impatiently. His gunners killed a goat, skinned it and cooked it on a wood fire. Napoleon ate a piece of the meat, ill-tasting without any salt. Only on the 24th did Napoleon receive orders to open fire. He did so to good effect, bombarding Maddalena village with shells and red-hot shot, and setting fire to it four times. He destroyed eighty houses, burned a timber yard and reduced the guns in the two enemy forts to silence.

On the 25th Cesari at last ordered the attack. The Fauvette was to sail close in-shore and land troops. But in the three days of inaction any ardour the sailors from Marseille might have had was gone. One sailor had been killed by a Sardinian shell and the others were frightened of the 450 Sardinian troops on Maddalena. ‘Take us back,’ they shouted to Cesari. The Corsican tried to rally them, but the sailors only became threatening and at last mutinous. Cesari broke down in tears – and was promptly nicknamed the pleureur.

The sailors forced Cesari to write a letter to Quenza, ordering him to evacuate San Stefano. When they read it, Quenza and Napoleon could hardly believe their eyes. But of course they had to obey. Napoleon and his men, heaving and pushing, managed to get the one-ton guns through the mud down to the beach. But the Fauvette sent boats enough only to take off the troops. In this, his first engagement, Napoleon had to spike his guns and abandon them to the enemy.

As the ill-fated expedition sailed back to Bonifacio, Napoleon suffered all the pangs of disappointment, frustration and shame. His immediate reaction was to write to the War Office urging another expedition to seize Maddalena and wipe out this ‘stain of dishonour’ on the second battalion; he enclosed two plans of attack. For the ill-named Cesari he felt scorn, for the Marseillais sailors, deep indignation, which he did not hide. A few days after their return some of the sailors seized Napoleon of the silver-fitted dressing-case and with cries of ‘L’aristocrat à la lanterne’ tried to string him up. This was prevented only by the lucky arrival of some of Napoleon’s Guardsmen.

The Maddalena affair left a lasting impression on Napoleon. It taught him, as only a first failure could, the difficulty of combined operations. It taught him the importance of speed, of the ‘favourable moment’ when men are tensed for action, and the enemy surprised. It taught him the vital importance of firmness in a commander, and of discipline in the ranks. It left him also with the conviction that if he had been in charge instead of Cesari, Maddalena would have fallen.

After Napoleon’s return, events began to move quickly. Lucien decided that Paoli was dragging his feet and even favouring the English, now at war with France. He went to Toulon and in a flamboyant speech denounced Paoli; calling on the revolutionary tribunal to ‘deliver his head to the sword of justice’. Lucien’s speech was read in the Convention, and the Government ordered Commissioner Saliceti to arrest Paoli.

Napoleon wrote to the Convention in defence of Paoli and when Saliceti landed went to see him in the hope of reconciling Paoli and France. But Paoli believed that, like Lucien, Napoleon had turned against him and issued an order for Napoleon’s capture, dead or alive. Napoleon had to take to the maquis and later regained Bastia by fishing-boat.

Napoleon was an outlaw, whom Paoli’s men would shoot on sight. But he was also a French officer committed to the notion that Corsica was part of the patrie. Where a less conscientious man would have caught the first boat for Marseille, Napoleon decided not only to hang on, but to fight back. Ajaccio, he explained to Saliceti, was mainly pro-French. With two warships and 400 light infantry he felt sure he could seize the town. So convincingly did Napoleon speak that Saliceti agreed to try.

By attacking Ajaccio, Napoleon knew that he would be endangering his family. So he sent a message to his mother, telling her to make her way secretly with the children to the ruined tower of Capitello, east of Ajaccio Gulf. Letizia obeyed and there, on 31 May, sailing in a small boat ahead of the French warships, Napoleon found her, signalling urgently. He had been alarmed for her safety and jumped into the sea so that he might take her more quickly in his arms. Then he sent her and the children by boat to French-held Calvi.

Next day Napoleon blazed away at the citadel with the ships’ guns, but the stone walls, several feet thick, resisted. Saliceti wrote Ajaccio council a letter urging them to declare for France, but the council replied that although attached to the Republic, they would have nothing to do with Saliceti, since he was Paoli’s enemy. Only thirty-one men from Ajaccio came over to the French ships. Napoleon had miscalculated popular feeling, and since the citadel still held, would have to sail back. One small triumph is, however, recorded. Some Ajaccians had climbed into trees beside the port and were hurling taunts at the French. Napoleon quietly loaded one of his light guns, took careful aim and fired. The shot shattered a branch on which one of the scoffers was perched: he dropped like a stone and the rest, roaring with laughter, dispersed.

On 3 June in Calvi Napoleon rejoined his mother, three brothers and four sisters, Lucien being in Toulon. He had failed in his attempt to prevent a split between Paoli and the French, failed against Ajaccio. Not only he but his family too were outlaws, for six days earlier the Corsican assembly had condemned the Buonapartes to ‘perpetual execration and infamy’. They were also ruined, for Paolists had sacked the Casa Buonaparte, seized all their corn, oil and wine, and wrecked their mill and three farmhouses. As far as Napoleon could see, there was nothing more they could do in Corsica. And in an island torn by civil war, how long would his mother and sisters be safe? Just as he had rescued Marie Anne from the Terror, so now he must rescue the whole family from the Paolists. He got passports for them all – Letizia he described as a seamstress – and a week later found passages for them in an ammunition ship returning to France. On 10 June 1793, with no money and no possessions save the clothes they wore, the Buonapartes set sail for France.