THE TOWN OF SARTENE.
The town of Sartene contains only 3890 inhabitants. It is the capital
of the arrondissement, which is divided into eight pieves or cantons,
and has a population amounting to 29,300. Sartene appeared to me a
rude country place, with less of the appearance of a town than even
Calvi or the little town of Isola Rossa; it does not, indeed, seem
to differ in any respect from the other large paeses of the island.
The style of building is that in common use in the villages, with the
addition of a little ornament. All the houses, and even the tower of
the largest church in the town, are built of brown granite, with loam
instead of mortar. The church alone has a coating of yellow wash; all
the other buildings are of the usual dark-brown hue. Many of the houses
are merely wretched huts; and some of the streets, on the slope of the
mountain, are so narrow, that two men can with difficulty pass each
other. Steep stairs of stone conduct us to the vaulted gate which stands
in the middle of the outer wall. I rambled through the streets; they
seemed to be inhabited by veritable demons; and I felt as if at some
corner I should suddenly come upon old Dis, or were wandering through
Dante's city of Hell. In the quarter of Santa Anna, however, there are
some elegant houses, belonging to the richer classes; and some have a
very pleasant appearance, in spite of the black stone of which they
are built. All are quaint, original, and picturesque in the highest
degree—effects which they owe to the blunt-cornered, projecting Italian
roofs, and the odd Italian chimneys; some in the shape of pillars,
with the strangest-looking capitals, others in the form of towers or
obelisks. A house with an Italian roof looks remarkably well; and, if
its walls are only built of regularly hewn stone, the appearance of it
is undoubtedly pleasing. I found my old cabins of Monte Rotondo again
in the market-place. They were used for provision-stores. The pompous
names of some of the inns—Hôtel de l'Europe, Hôtel de Paris, Hôtel de
la France—were ridiculous enough beside these primitive specimens of
Corsican architecture.
The name _Sartene_ seems to have some connexion with Sardinia or
Saracen. No one could give me any information as to the origin of
the word. In ancient times, the town was called Sartino; and a local
tradition informs us that it was once famous for its mineral springs.
At that time strangers flocked to the place for the benefit of these
waters. The poor inhabitants of the barren spot died in consequence of
hunger—for the strangers seized upon all the produce of the soil. The
inhabitants, resolved no longer to endure such a state of things, choked
up the springs, abandoned their houses, and built a town higher up among
the mountains. If this tradition is a true one, it forms no testimony
in favour of anything but Corsican indolence.
Sartene suffered terribly from the Saracens. The Moors, after repeated
attacks, surprised the town in the year 1583, and in one day carried off
four hundred persons into captivity—the third part of the population at
that time. From that date, Sartene has been defended by a strong wall.
To-day, standing in this quiet town, whose inhabitants are talking
peacefully together under the large elm-tree, in the quaint, idyllic
market-place, one cannot believe that revenge and the fiercer passions
could find a lurking-place within its walls. And yet this town, after
the Revolution of July, was for many years the scene of a horrible
civil war. The citizens have been divided, since the year 1815, into
two parties—the adherents of the family of Rocca Serra, and those
of the family of Ortoli. The former party is composed of the richer
inhabitants, who live in the quarter of Santa Anna; the latter, of
the poorer classes occupying the Borgo. Both factions had intrenched
themselves, barred their houses, shut their windows, and proceeded to
make sorties upon each other, to shoot and to stab one another with the
most furious zeal. The Rocca Serrans were the Whites or Bourbonists, the
Ortoli the Reds or Liberals; the former had forbidden the opposite party
admission into their quarter of the town; and the Ortoli, in contempt of
this declaration, had formed a procession, and marched with flags flying
into Santa Anna. The Rocca Serrans immediately ran to their arms, and
shot at the procession from their windows, killed three men and wounded
several others. This was the signal for a bloody combat. The day after,
several hundred mountaineers came with their guns to the assistance of
the Ortoli, and besieged Santa Anna. The Government despatched a body
of soldiers, which had the effect of apparently restoring order. Both
parties, however, continued hostilities, and many lives were lost on
both sides. The hostile feeling continues to this day, although, after
thirty-three years of deadly feud, the Rocca Serrans and the Ortoli,
on the occasion of the election of Louis Napoleon as President, held a
meeting of reconciliation, where their children were allowed to dance
together.
Corsica, with these inextinguishable family feuds, presents the same
picture as the Italian cities of Florence, Bologna, Verona, Padua, and
Milan, several centuries ago. The Italian Middle Ages still survive
in this island; and here still rage the same tumults described so
picturesquely by Dino Compagni in his chronicles of Florence—that war
of fellow-citizens, whom, as Dante complains, the same ditch surrounds
and the same wall defends. But in Corsica, these feuds are much more
remarkable and more terrible; raging, as they do, in districts of so
small an extent, in villages with a population of not above one thousand
souls, the inhabitants of which are indissolubly connected by the ties
of blood and hospitality.
To-day the people of the town are assembled in the marketplace, where
an odd sort of scaffolding is being erected, for the exhibition of
fireworks, against the 15th of August, the anniversary of Napoleon's
christening. It is not improbable that the festival may rekindle the
flame, and these black houses may in a few days be transformed into
little fortresses, from which shots of death will be scattered around.
Here it was political feeling that stirred up the angry passions of the
townspeople; in other districts strife has been kindled by a personal
offence, or some accidental circumstance of the most trivial nature. The
shooting of a goat has occasioned the death of sixteen men, and roused
a whole canton to arms. A young man throws a piece of bread to his dog,
another man's dog snatches it; and a feud arises between two parishes,
with death and murder upon both sides. Causes of quarrel are never
wanting at the communal elections, festivals, or dances; these are often
extremely ridiculous. At Mariana, in the year 1832, a dead ass became
the occasion of a bloody feud between two villages. A procession from
one of the villages was proceeding, during Easter-week, to a chapel, on
the road to which a dead ass was lying. Upon this, the sacristan began
to curse the people who had thrown the ass upon the road, and had thus
profaned the holy procession. Immediately there arose a quarrel between
the people of Lucciana and those of Borgo—the parish to which the ass
belonged; guns were unslung, and shots exchanged; the holy procession
was suddenly transformed into a confused mass of combatants. The one
parish threw the blame of the dead ass upon the other; the body was
dragged from Borgo to Lucciana, and from Lucciana to Borgo; and these
pilgrimages were on every occasion accompanied with fighting, shooting,
and the furious shouts of battle.
It resembled the combat of the Greeks and Trojans for the dead body of
Patroclus. The people of Borgo dragged the dead ass to the chapel of
Lucciana, and flung it down at the door of the church; the Luccianese
carried it off to Borgo, and after storming the village, fixed it on the
church-tower. At last the Podestà seized the _corpus delicti_, already
in a state of rapid decomposition, and none the better for its frequent
travels, and the dead ass found a quiet resting-place in the grave. The
poet Viale has written a comic Epopee on this occurrence, in the style
of the Stolen Bucket of Bologna.
A detachment of ten gendarmes is at present stationed in Sartene. The
same number is usually posted in the chief town of every canton, and in
those villages which are particularly troublesome. The officer of the
company was an Alsatian, who had lived twenty-two years in the island,
seemingly quite happily, and without any expectation of meeting a
countryman in Sartene. Whenever I meet an Alsatian or a Lothringian—the
latter always speak very inaccurate German—I feel deep sorrow for
these lost German brethren of mine. It always brings a pang to my
heart, to think of a branch of the noble old German oak in the hands
of the French. This officer had severe complaints to make regarding
the dangerous service in which he was employed, and the petty warfare
he had to carry on with the banditti. He pointed to a mountain in the
distance—the lofty Incudine. "Look," said he, "yonder sits a captain
of banditti, whom we have to hunt like a wild sheep. There are fifteen
hundred francs on his head, but they are not so easy to win. A few days
ago we apprehended twenty-nine men who had been carrying provisions to
the fellow. I have them here in the barracks."
"What will be their punishment?"
"A year's imprisonment, if they are convicted. They are herdsmen or
mountain-people, friends and relations of the bandit."
Poor Corsica! what, under circumstances like these, is to become of thy
industry and thy agriculture!
The view of the dark mountain of Incudine where the poor bandit is
sitting, and the recollection of the feuds of Sartene, recall to my
mind some stories from the inexhaustible stores of the Corsican romance
of revenge. Let us sit down together upon a rock, in sight of these
glorious mountains, and the waters of the Gulf of Valinco, and listen
to two stories about Corsican guns and their owners.