“Egregius Hieronimus di Buonaparte, procurator Nobilium.”  These distinctions they seem to have little coveted.  Very few families belonged to the Corsican noblesse, and their fiefs were unimportant.  In Corsica, as in the Forest Cantons of Switzerland and the Highlands of Scotland, class distinctions were by no means so coveted as in lands that had been thoroughly feudalized; and the Buonapartes, content with their civic dignities at Ajaccio and the attachment of their partisans on their country estates, seem rarely to have used the prefix which implied nobility.  Their life was not unlike that of many an old Scottish laird, who, though possibly bourgeois in origin, yet by courtesy ranked as chieftain among his tenants, and was ennobled by the parlance of the countryside, perhaps all the more readily because he refused to wear the honours that came from over the Border.

But a new influence was now to call forth all the powers of this tough stock.  In the middle of the eighteenth century we find the head of the family, Charles Marie Buonaparte, aglow with the flame of Corsican patriotism then being kindled by the noble career of Paoli.  This gifted patriot, the champion of the islanders, first against the Genoese and later against the French, desired to cement by education the framework of the Corsican Commonwealth and founded a university.  It was here that the father of the future French Emperor received a training in law, and a mental stimulus which was to lift his family above the level of the caporali and attorneys with whom its lot had for centuries been cast.  His ambition is seen in the endeavour, successfully carried out by his uncle, Lucien, Archdeacon of Ajaccio, to obtain recognition of kinship with the Buonapartes of Tuscany who had been ennobled by the Grand Duke.  His patriotism is evinced in his ardent support of Paoli, by whose valour and energy the Genoese were finally driven from the island.  Amidst these patriotic triumphs Charles confronted his destiny in the person of Letizia Ramolino, a beautiful girl, descended from an honourable Florentine family which had for centuries been settled in Corsica.  The wedding took place in 1764, the bridegroom being then eighteen, and the bride fifteen years of age.  The union, if rashly undertaken in the midst of civil strifes, was yet well assorted.  Both parties to it were of patrician, if not definitely noble descent, and came of families which combined the intellectual gifts of Tuscany with the vigour of their later island home[3].  From her mother’s race, the Pietra Santa family, Letizia imbibed the habits of the most backward and savage part of Corsica, where vendettas were rife and education was almost unknown.  Left in ignorance in her early days, she yet was accustomed to hardships, and often showed the fertility of resource which such a life always develops.  Hence, at the time of her marriage, she possessed a firmness of will far beyond her years;