Salicetti and Buonaparte now plan by various artifices to gain the citadel of Ajaccio from the Paolists, but guile is three times foiled by guile equally astute.  Failing here, the young captain seeks to communicate with the French commissioners at Bastia.  He sets out secretly, with a trusty shepherd as companion, to cross the island:  but at the village of Bocognano he is recognized and imprisoned by the partisans of Paoli.  Some of the villagers, however, retain their old affection to the Buonaparte family, which here has an ancestral estate, and secretly set him free.  He returns to Ajaccio, only to find an order for his arrest issued by the Corsican patriots.  This time he escapes by timely concealment in the grotto of a friend’s garden; and from the grounds of another family connection he finally glides away in a vessel to a point of safety, whence he reaches Bastia.

Still, though a fugitive, he persists in believing that Ajaccio is French at heart, and urges the sending of a liberating force.  The French commissioners agree, and the expedition sails—­only to meet with utter failure.  Ajaccio, as one man, repels the partisans of France; and, a gale of wind springing up, Buonaparte and his men regain their boats with the utmost difficulty.  At a place hard by, he finds his mother, uncle, brothers and sisters.  Madame Buonaparte, with the extraordinary tenacity of will that characterized her famous son, had wished to defend her house at Ajaccio against the hostile populace; but, yielding to the urgent warnings of friends, finally fled to the nearest place of safety, and left the house to the fury of the populace, by whom it was nearly wrecked.

For a brief space Buonaparte clung to the hope of regaining Corsica for the Republic, but now only by the aid of French troops.  For the islanders, stung by the demand of the French Convention that Paoli should go to Paris, had rallied to the dictator’s side; and the aged chief made overtures to England for alliance.  The partisans of France, now menaced by England’s naval power, were in an utterly untenable position.  Even the steel-like will of Buonaparte was bent.  His career in Corsica was at an end for the present; and with his kith and kin he set sail for France.

The interest of the events above described lies, not in their intrinsic importance, but in the signal proof which they afford of Buonaparte’s wondrous endowments of mind and will.  In a losing cause and in a petty sphere he displays all the qualities which, when the omens were favourable, impelled him to the domination of a Continent.  He fights every inch of ground tenaciously; at each emergency he evinces a truly Italian fertility of resource, gliding round obstacles or striving to shatter them by sheer audacity, seeing through men, cajoling them by his insinuations or overawing them by his mental superiority, ever determined to try the fickle jade Fortune to the very utmost, and retreating only before the inevitable.  The sole weakness discoverable in this nature, otherwise compact of strength, is an excess of will-power over all the faculties that make for prudence.  His vivid imagination only serves to fire him with the full assurance that he must prevail over all obstacles.