Another admirer who actually visited Corsica and met Paoli was James
Boswell, Dr Johnson's faithful companion and biographer. Boswell in his
Account of Corsica (1768) famously compared the Corsicans, with their
clans and martial traditions, with the Scottish Highlanders before the
1745 Jacobite Rising. The thought had occurred to others: at one time
Bonnie Prince Charlie himself was proposed as a possible King of
Corsica. So enthusiastic for Paoli was Boswell that Dr Johnson accused
him of being a bore on the subject.
But Paoli had scarcely completed the conquest of the interior and
introduced his reforms when Corsica once again became a pawn on the
international diplomatic chessboard. Just before the outbreak of the
Seven Years War in 1756, by treaty arrangement the French poured their
troops into Calvi, Ajaccio and St-Florent. They pulled them out again
when war broke out, but reintroduced them in 1764. French encroach
ment reached its apogee the year before Napoleon's birth, in 1768, when
Genoa formally ceded the island to France; Paoli and his men learned
that they had fought the Genoese only to be delivered to the suzerainty of
Louis XV. In fury the Paolistas rose in revolt against the French. They
scored a string of minor military successes but were decisively crushed on
8 May 1769 at the battle of Ponte Novo. Among those who fled with Paoli
from this disaster were Carlo Buonaparte and his nineteen-year-old wife,
now six months pregnant with the future Napoleon.
Napoleonic legend credited the embryonic conqueror with having been
present in foetal form at Ponte Novo. What happened was dramatic
enough, for Carlo and Letizia fled with the other rebels into the
mountains towards Corte; it is therefore true to say that the embryonic
Napoleon was literally on the march. When Paoli recognized the
inevitable and accepted French surrender terms, Carlo and Letizia
returned to Ajaccio by the mountain route; to the end of her life Letizia
always remembered carrying Joseph in her arms while staggering and
slipping along precipitous paths.
Back in Ajaccio Letizia came to full term. On the feast of the
Assumption she was at mass in the cathedral when the labour pains
started. Fortunately she was only a minute's walk away from the three
storey Buonaparte family home, and her sister-in-law Geltruda Paravicini
helped her to walk the few yards. A curmudgeonly maidservant named
Caterina acted as the midwife and laid the newborn infant on a carpet, on
which were woven scenes from the Iliad and the Odyssey. The child was
weak, with spindly legs and a large head, but sea air and the abundant
milk from wet-nurse Camilla Ilari, a sailor's wife, saw him through the
perilous early days. Tradition says that a priest came from the cathedral
marcin
(Marcin)
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