d up so many tottering church
steeples, founded so many asylums, proposed and drunk so many
toasts, absorbed so much talk and Talano wine and white cheese,
that I have found no time to send an affectionate word to the
little family circle around the big table, from which I have been
missing for two weeks. Luckily my absence will not last much
longer, for we expect to leave day after to-morrow and travel
straight through to Paris. So far as the election is concerned, I
fancy that our trip has been successful. Corsica is a wonderful
country, indolent and poor, a mixture of poverty and of pride which
makes both the noble and bourgeois families keep up a certain
appearance of opulence even at the price of the most painful
privations. They talk here in all seriousness of the great wealth
of Popolasca, the indigent deputy whom death robbed of the hundred
thousand francs his resignation in the Nabob's favor would have
brought him. All these people have, moreover, a frenzied longing
for offices, an administrative mania, a craving to wear a uniform
of some sort and a flat cap on which they can write: "Government
clerk." If you should give a Corsican peasant his choice between
the richest farm in Beauce and the baldric of the humblest
forest-warden, he would not hesitate a moment, he would choose the
baldric. Under such circumstances you can judge whether a candidate
with a large fortune and governmental favors at his disposal has a
good chance of being elected. Elected M. Jansoulet will be,
therefore, especially if he succeeds in the move which he is making
at this moment and which has brought us to the only inn of a small
village called Pozzonegro (Black Well), a genuine well, all black
with verdure, fifty cottages built of red stone clustered around a
church of the Italian type, in the bottom of a ravine surrounded by
steep hills, by cliffs of bright-colored sandstone, scaled by vast
forests of larches and junipers. Through my open window, at which I
am writing, I can see a bit of blue sky overhead, the orifice of
the black well; below, on the little square, shaded by an enormous
walnut tree, as if the shadows were not dense enough already, two
shepherds dressed in skins are playing cards on the stone curb of a
fountain. Gambling is the disease of this country of sloth, where
the crops