his
country. My father was his adjutant, and never will I forgive him
for having aided in the union of Corsica with France. He should have
followed her fortunes and have succumbed only with her." Throughout his
youth he is at heart anti-French, morose, "bitter, liking very few and
very little liked, brooding over resentment," like a vanquished man,
always moody and compelled to work against the grain. At Brienne, he
keeps aloof from his comrades, takes no part in their sports, shuts
himself in the library, and opens himself up only to Bourrienne
in explosions of hatred: "I will do you Frenchmen all the harm I
can!"--"Corsican by nation and character," wrote his professor of
history in the Military Academy, "he will go far if circumstances
favor him."[1116]--Leaving the Academy, and in garrison at Valence and
Auxonne, he remains always hostile, denationalized; his old bitterness
returns, and, addressing his letters to Paoli, he says: "I was born when
our country perished. Thirty thousand Frenchmen vomited on our shores,
drowning the throne of liberty in floods of blood--such was the odious
spectacle on which my eyes first opened! The groans of the dying, the
shrieks of the oppressed, tears of despair, surrounded my cradle from
my birth... I will blacken those who betrayed the common cause with
the brush of infamy.... vile, sordid souls corrupted by gain!"[1117]
A little later, his letter to Buttafuoco, deputy in the Constituent
Assembly and principal agent in the annexation to France, is one long
strain of renewed, concentrated hatred, which, after at first trying
to restrain it within the bounds of cold sarcasm, ends in boiling over,
like red-hot lava, in a torrent of scorching invective.--From the age of
fifteen, at the Academy and afterwards in his regiment, he finds refuge
in imagination in the past of his island;[1118] he recounts its history,
his mind dwells upon it for many years, and he dedicates his work to
Paoli. Unable to get it published, he abridges it, and dedicates the
abridgment to Abbe Raynal, recapitulating in a strained style, with
warm, vibrating sympathy, the annals of his small community, its revolts
and deliverances, its heroic and sanguinary outbreaks, its public
and domestic tragedies, ambuscades, betrayals, revenges, loves,
and murders,--in short, a history similar to that of the Scottish
highlanders, while the style, still more than the sympathies, denotes
the foreigner. Undoubtedly, in this wor