Pozzonegro--near Sartene.
At last I can give you my news, dear M. Joyeuse. During the five days
we have been in Corsica we have rushed about so much, made so many
speeches, so often changed carriages and mounts--now on mules, now on
asses, or even on the backs of men for crossing the torrents--written so
many letters, noted so many requests, visited so many schools,
presented chasubles, altar-cloths, renewed cracked bells, and founded
kindergartens; we have inaugurated so many things, proposed so many
toasts, listened to so many harangues, consumed so much Talano wine and
white cheese, that I have not found time to send even a greeting to the
little family circle round the big table, from which I have been missing
these two months. Happily my absence will not be for much longer, as we
expect to leave the day after to-morrow, and are coming straight back
to Paris. From the electioneering point of view, I think our journey has
been a success. Corsica is an admirable country, indolent and poor, a
mixture of poverty and pride, which makes both the nobles and the middle
classes strive to keep up an appearance of easy circumstances at the
price of the most painful privations. They speak quite seriously of
Popolasca’s fortune--that needy deputy whom death robbed of the four
thousand pounds his resignation in favour of the Nabob would have
brought him. All these people have, as well, an administrative mania, a
thirst for places which give them any sort of uniform, and a cap to
wear with the words “Government official” written on it. If you gave a
Corsican peasant the choice between the richest farm in France and the
shabbiest sword-belt of a village policeman, he would not hesitate and
would take the belt. In that conditions of things, you may imagine
what chances of election a candidate has who can dispose of a personal
fortune and the Government favours. Thus, M. Jansoulet will be elected;
and especially if he succeeds in his present undertaking, which has
brought us here to the only inn of a little place called Pozzonegro
(black well). It is a regular well, black with foliage, consisting of
fifty small red-stone houses clustered round a long Italian church, at
the bottom of a ravine between rigid hills and coloured sandstone rocks,
over which stretch immense forests of larch and juniper trees. From my
open window, at which I am writing, I see up above there a bit of blue
sky, the orifice of the well; down below on the little square--which
a huge nut-tree shades as though the shadows were not already thick
enough--two shepherds clothed in sheep-skins are playing at cards, with
their elbows on the stone of a fountain. Gambling is the bane of this
land of idleness, where they get men from Lucca to do their harvesting.
The two poor wretches I see probably haven’t a farthing between them,
but one bets his knife against a cheese wrapped up in vine leaves, and
the stakes lie between them on the bench. A little priest smokes his
cigar as he watches them, and seems to take the liveliest interest in
their game.
And that is not all. Not a sound anywhere except the drops of water on
the stone, the oaths of one of the players who swears by the _sango
del seminaro_, and from underneath my room in the inn parlour the eager
voice of our friend mingling with the sputterings of the illustrious
Paganetti, who is interpreter, in his conversation with the not less
illustrious Piedigriggio.
M. Piedigriggio (gray feet) is a local celebrity. He is a tall, old man
of seventy-five, with a flowing beard and a straight back. He wears a
little pilot coat, a brown wool Catalonian cap on his white locks. At
his belt he carries a pair of scissors to cut the long leaves of the
green tobacco he smokes into the hollow of his hand. A venerable-looking
person in fact, and when he crossed the square, shaking hands with
the priest, smiling protectingly at the gamblers, I would never have
believed that I was looking at the famous brigand Piedigriggio, who held
the woods in Monte-Rotondo from 1840 to 1860, outwitted the police and
the military, and who to-day, thanks to the proscription by which he
benefits, after seven or eight cold-blooded murders, moves peaceably
about the country which witnessed his crimes, and enjoys a considerable
importance. This is why: Piedigriggio has two sons who, nobly following
in his footsteps, have taken to the carbine and the woods, in their
turn not to be found, not to be caught, as their father was, for twenty
years; warned by the shepherds of the movements of the police, when the
latter leave a village, they make their appearance in it. The eldest,
Scipio, came to mass last Sunday at Pozzonegro. To say they love them,
and that the bloody hand-shake of those wretches is a pleasure to all
who harbour them, would be to calumniate the peaceful inhabitants of
this parish. But they fear them, and their will is law.
Now, these Piedigriggios have taken it into their heads to favour our
opponent in the election. And their influence is a formidable power, for
they can make two whole cantons vote against us. They have long
legs, the rascals, as long in proportion as the reach of their guns.
Naturally, we have the police on our side, but the brigands are far more
powerful. As our innkeeper said this morning: “The police, they go away;
_ma_ the _banditti_ they stay.” In the face of this logical reasoning
we understood that the only thing to be done was to treat with the
Gray-feet, to try a “job,” in fact. The mayor said something of this to
the old man, who consulted his sons, and it is the conditions of this
treaty they are discussing downstairs. I hear the voice of our general
director, “Come, my dear fellow, you know I am an old Corsican myself,”
and then the other’s quiet replies, broken, like his tobacco, by the
irritating noise of his scissors. The “dear fellow” does not seem to
have much confidence, and until the coin is ringing upon the table I
fancy there will not be any advance.
You see, Paganetti is known in his native country. The worth of his word
is written on the square in Corte, still waiting for the monument to
Paoli, on the vast fields of carrots which he has managed to plant
on the Island of Ithaca, in the gaping empty purses of all those
unfortunate small tradesmen, village priests, and petty nobility, whose
poor savings he has swallowed up dazzling their eyes with chimerical
_combinazioni_. Truly, for him to dare to come back here, it needed all
his phenomenal audacity, as well as the resources now at his disposal to
satisfy all claims.
And, indeed, what truth is there in the fabulous works undertaken by the
Territorial Bank?
None.
Mines, which produce nothing and never will produce anything, for they
exist only on paper; quarries, which are still innocent of pick or
dynamite, tracts of uncultivated sandy land that they survey with a
gesture, telling you, “We begin here, and we go right over there, as
far as you like.” It is the same with the forests. The whole of a wooded
hill in Monte-Rotondo belongs to us, it seems, but the felling of the
trees is impossible unless aeronauts undertake the woodman’s work. It is
the same with the watering-places, among which this miserable hamlet
of Pozzonegro is one of the most important, with its fountain whose
astonishing ferruginous properties Paganetti advertises. Of the
streamers, not a shadow. Stay--an old, half-ruined Genoese tower on the
shore of the Gulf of Ajaccio bears on a tarnished escutcheon, above
its hermetically sealed doors, this inscription: “Paganetti’s Agency.
Maritime Company. Inquiry Office.” Fat, gray lizards tend the office in
company with an owl. As for the railways, all these honest Corsicans to
whom I spoke of it smiled knowingly, replied with winks and mysterious
hints, and it was only this morning that I had the exceedingly
buffoonish explanation of all this reticence.
I had read among the documents which the director-general flaunts in our
eyes from time to time, like a fan to puff up his impostures, the bill
of sale of a marble quarry at a place said to be “Taverna,” two hours’
distance from Pozzonegro. Profiting by our stay here, I got on a mule
this morning, without telling any one, and guided by a tall scamp of
a fellow with legs like a deer--true type of a Corsican poacher or
smuggler, his thick, red pipe in his mouth, his gun in a bandoleer--I
went to Taverna. After a fearful progress across cracked rocks and bogs,
past abysses of unsoundable depths--on the very edges of which my
mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes--we
arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey.
It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the
droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite
near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the
waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds. My guide,
who has a holy horror of excisemen and the police, stayed above on the
cliff, because of a little coastguard station posted like a watchman on
the shore. I made for a large red building which still maintained, in
this burning solitude its three stories, in spite of broken windows
and ruinous tiles. Over the worm-eaten door was an immense sign-board:
“Territorial Bank. Carr----bre----54.” The wind, the sun, the rain, have
wiped out the rest.
There has been there, certainly, a commencement of operations, for a
large square, gaping hole, cut out with a punch, is still open in the
ground, showing along its crumbling sides, like a leopard’s spots, red
slabs with brown veins, and at the bottom, in the brambles, enormous
blocks of the marble, called in the trade “black-heart” (marble spotted
with red and brown), condemned blocks that no one could make anything of
for want of a road leading to the quarry or a harbour to make the coast
accessible for freight ships, and for want, above all, of subsidies
considerable enough to carry out one or the other of these two projects.
So the quarry remains abandoned, at a few cable-lengths from the
shore, as cumbrous and useless as Robinson Crusoe’s canoe in the same
unfortunate circumstances. These details of the heart-rending story of
our sole territorial wealth were furnished by a miserable caretaker,
shaking with fever, whom I found in the low-ceilinged room of the yellow
house trying to roast a piece of kid over the acrid smoke of a pistachio
bush.
This man, who in himself is the whole staff of the Territorial Bank in
Corsica, is Paganetti’s foster-father, an old lighthouse-keeper upon
whom the solitude does not weigh. Our director-general leaves him there
partly for charity and partly because letters dated from the Taverna
quarry, now and again, make a good show at the shareholders’ meetings.
I had the greatest difficulty extracting a little information from this
poor creature, three parts savage, who looked upon me with cautious
mistrust, half hidden behind the long hair of his goat-skin _pelone_. He
told me, however, without intending it, what the Corsicans understand by
the word “railway,” and why they put on mysterious airs when they speak
of it. As I was trying to find out if he knew anything about the scheme
for a railway in the country, this old man, instead of smiling knowingly
like his compatriots, said, quite naturally, in passable French, his
voice rusty and benumbed like an ancient, little-used lock:
“Oh, sir, no need of a railway here.”
“But it would be most valuable, most useful; it would facilitate
communications.”
“I don’t say no; but with the police we have enough here.”
“The policemen?”
“Certainly.”
This _quid pro quo_ went on for some five minutes before I discovered
that here the secret police service is called “the railway.” As there
are many Corsican policemen on the Continent they use this euphemism to
designate the ignoble calling they follow. You inquire of the relations,
“Where is your brother Ambrosini? What is your uncle Barbicaglia doing?”
They will answer with a little wink, “He has a place on the railway,”
and every one knows what that means. Among the people, the peasants,
who have never seen a railway and don’t know what it is, it is quite
seriously believed that the great occult administration of the Imperial
police has no other name than that. Our principal agent in the country
shares this touching simplicity of belief. It shows you the real
state of the “Line from Ajaccio to Bastia, passing by Bonifacio, Porto
Vecchio, etc.,” as it is written on the big, green-backed books of
the house of Paganetti. In fact all the goods of the Territorial Bank
consist of a few sign-boards and two ruins, the whole not worthy of
lying in the “old materials” yard in the Rue Saint-Ferdinand; every
night as I go to sleep I hear the old vanes grating and the old doors
banging on emptiness.
But in this case, where have gone, where are going now, the enormous
sums M. Jansoulet has spent during the last five months--not to count
what came from the outside, attracted by the magic of his name? I
thought, as you did, that all these soundings, borings, purchasings of
land that the books set forth in fine round-hand were exaggerated beyond
measure. But who could suspect such effrontery? This is why the director
was so opposed to the idea of bringing me on the electioneering trip.
I don’t want to have an explanation now. My poor Nabob has quite enough
trouble in this election. Only, whenever we get back, I shall lay before
him all the details of my long inquiry, and, whether he wants it or not,
I will get him out of this den of thieves. They have finished below.
Old Piedigriggio is crossing the square, pulling up the slip-knot of
his long peasant’s purse, which looks to me well filled. The bargain is
made, I conclude. Good-bye, hurriedly, my dear M. Joyeuse; remember me
to your daughters and ask them to keep a tiny little place for me round
the work-table.