us,
and sometimes unscrupulous. Yet for all that, the hospitality of her
little home in Ajaccio was lavish and famous. Among the many guests
who were regularly entertained there was Marbeuf, commander in Corsica
of the first army of occupation. There was long afterward a malicious
tradition that the French general was Napoleon's father. The morals of
Letizia di Buonaparte, like those of her conspicuous children, have
been bitterly assailed, but her good name, at least, has always been
vindicated. The evident motive of the story sufficiently refutes such
an aspersion as it contains. Of the bride's extraordinary beauty there
has never been a doubt. She was a woman of heroic mold, like Juno in
her majesty; unmoved in prosperity, undaunted in adversity. It was
probably to his mother, whom he strongly resembled in childhood, that
the famous son owed his tremendous and unparalleled physical
endurance.

After their marriage the youthful pair resided in Corte, waiting until
events should permit their return to Ajaccio. Naturally of an indolent
temperament, the husband, though he had at first been drawn into the
daring enterprises of Paoli, and had displayed a momentary enthusiasm,
was now, as he had been for more than a year, weary of them. At the
head of a body of men of his own rank, he finally withdrew to Monte
Rotondo, and on May twenty-third, 1769, a few weeks before Paoli's
flight, the band made formal submission to Vaux, commander of the
second army of occupation, explaining through Buonaparte that the
national leader had misled them by promises of aid which never came,
and that, recognizing the impossibility of further resistance, they
were anxious to accept the new government, to return to their homes,
and to resume the peaceful conduct of their affairs. This at least is
the generally accepted account of his desertion of Paoli's cause:
there is some evidence that having followed Clement, a brother of
Pascal, into a remoter district, he had there found no support for the
enterprise, and had thence under great hardships of flood and field
made his way with wife and child to the French headquarters. The
result was the same in either case. It was the precipitate
naturalization of the father as a French subject which made his great
son a Frenchman. Less than three months afterward, on August
fifteenth, the fourth child, Napoleone di Buonaparte, was born in
Ajaccio, the seat of French influence.

The resources of the Buon