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.