LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER 4 Failure in Corsica

      IN October 1791 Napoleon returned to Ajaccio on leave, exchanging gun drill and cramped billets for the friendly, spacious house in Via Malerba, French for Italian, café meals for the ravioli and macaroni he missed in France. The wine grapes were ripening, the mountain shrubs still had that sweet scent Napoleon said he could recognize anywhere. The surroundings were the same, but everyone was a little older.

      Napoleon found his mother in her seventh year of widowhood. She was still beautiful and had declined two offers to re-marry, wishing to remain faithful to the memory of Carlo and to devote herself fully to her children. As a widow she always wore black. Instead of three servants she could now afford only one, a woman called Saveriana, who insisted on staying, though paid only a nominal three francs a month. Letizia had so much housework that for a time she could no longer fulfil her self-imposed vow of going to daily Mass.

      Joseph was a quietly intelligent young man of twenty-three, a qualified lawyer interested in politics and soon to become a member of Ajaccio council. Lucien was aged sixteen. During his brothers’ absence at school he had been made a fuss of; the return of Joseph, and of Napoleon on periods of leave, made Lucien somewhat resentful and acerbated an already prickly character; he was a vigorous speaker, however, and soon to be the orator of the family. Marie Anne, aged fourteen, was absent at Saint-Cyr. Louis, whom Napoleon brought home with him, was thirteen, a good-looking, affectionate, unusually scrupulous boy. Pauline, eleven, was a lively charmer, who felt everything deeply yet had a sense of fun – she was Napoleon’s favourite sister. Caroline, who was nine and fair-complexioned, had a gift for music. The last of Letizia’s thirteen children, of whom eight had survived, was Jerome, a cocky, somewhat spoiled little show-off.

      To his family Napoleon, sword at hip, was a respected figure, the only Buonaparte earning a regular income. He was of average height by French standards, but shorter than most Corsican men, and very slim – he barely filled out his blue uniform with red facings. He had a lean angular face with a very pronounced jaw; his eyes were bluish-grey, his complexion olive. He had spent two previous leaves at home, but those had been periods of tranquillity when he had read Corneille and Voltaire aloud with Joseph and taken his mother, who still suffered from stiffness in her left side, to the iron-rich waters of Guagno. His present leave was to be much less serene.

      Also in the house was Archdeacon Lucciano, now in his seventy-sixth year and confined by gout to bed, where he continued to do a highly profitable business in farms, wine, horses, wheat and pigs. He was also extremely litigious: in one year he had appeared in court on five separate occasions. Usually he won his cases and he became very rich. For safety he kept his money – gold coins, all of it – in his mattress.

      The rest of the family, by contrast, were very poor. Carlo had signed a favourable contract with the French Government to produce 10,000 young mulberry trees for silk. During his boyhood the mulberry had been a symbol of future Buonaparte riches – hence Napoleon’s apostrophe of the mulberry tree at Brienne. But now it stood for disaster because the French Government had cancelled the contract, leaving the Buonapartes stuck with many thousands of young mulberry trees not even useful for their fruit, since this species bore an insipid white berry scorned in an island of grapes and cherries. Letizia was 3,800 livres out of pocket. But Lucciano would not help. Nothing would make him part with a penny.

      When money was badly needed, Pauline the charmer was delegated to go up to the old man and, while playing around, to try to extract a gold louis or two out of his mattress. One day, as she went about it awkwardly, the whole bag fell with a clatter on the tiled floor. Speechless for a moment, the Archdeacon soon roused the house with his cries. Letizia ran up and found him staring, outraged, at his treasured hoard scattered on the floor. He swore ‘by all the saints in heaven’ that none of the gold was his: he was only keeping it for friends or clients. Letizia silently picked up the coins. The Archdeacon counted them, put them back in the bag, and replaced the bag in his mattress.

      Napoleon liked his great-uncle despite his avarice, and would talk to him by the hour. He was sorry to see him ill and, wondering how he could be of help, recalled a Swiss doctor named Samuel Tissot, the first medical man to suggest that sick people should treat themselves. Tissot had published three famous books, one on Onanism, in which he warned that masturbation could lead to madness, another on the disorders of people of fashion, for which he prescribed fresh air, exercise and a vegetable diet, and a third on diseases incidental to literary and sedentary persons, for which he prescribed walking, cinnamon, nutmeg, fennel and chervil. In the second book, being a staunch republican, Tissot put in a good word for Paoli. That was enough to make Napoleon’s eyes light up: he believed Tissot was a kindred spirit, and wrote a letter ‘To Monsieur Tissot, Doctor of Medicine, Fellow of the Royal Society, residing in Lausanne’.

      ‘Humanity, sir,’ Napoleon began, ‘leads me to hope that you will deign to reply to this unusual consultation. I myself for the last month have been suffering from tertian

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