Note Back to Main Text — Chapter XV

It was probably in this interval that Paoli finally adopted, as a last desperate resort, the hitherto hazy idea of putting the island under English protection, in order to maintain himself in the mission to which he felt that Providence had called him. The actual departure of Napoleon's expedition from St. Florent gave the final impulse. That event so inflamed the passions of the conservative party in Ajaccio that the Buonaparte family could no longer think of returning within a reasonable time to their home. Some desperate resolution must be taken, though it should involve leaving their small estates to be ravaged, their slender resources to be destroyed, and abandoning their partizans to proscription and imprisonment. They finally found a temporary asylum with a relative in Calvi. The attacking flotilla had been detained nearly a week by a storm, and reached Ajaccio on May twenty-ninth, in the very height of these turmoils. It was too late for any possibility of success. The few French troops on shore were cowed, and dared not show themselves when a party landed from the ships. On the contrary, Napoleon and his volunteers were received with a fire of musketry, and, after spending two anxious days in an outlying tower which they had seized and held, were glad to reëmbark and sail away. Their leader, after still another narrow escape from seizure, rejoined his family at Calvi. The Jacobin commission held a meeting, and determined to send Salicetti to justify their course at Paris. He carried with him a wordy paper written by Buonaparte in his worst style and spelling, setting forth the military and political situation in Corsica, and containing a bitter tirade against Paoli, which remains to lend some color to the charge that the writer had been, since his leader's return from exile, a spy and an informer, influenced by no high principle of patriotism, but only by a base ambition to supplant the aged president, and then to adopt whichever plan would best further his own interest: ready either to establish a virtual autonomy in his fatherland, or to deliver it entirely into the hands of France.[34]