A Corsican Bandit
The road followed a gentle slope through the middle of the forest of Aïtone. Enormous pines spread out in an arch above our heads, making their sad, continuous, moaning complaint, while to our right and our left the thin straight trunks of the trees formed, as it were, a group of organ-pipes from which the monotonous music of the wind in the treetops seemed to issue.
After a three hours’ tramp there was a clearance in the tangled mass of long reeds: here and there a gigantic umbrella-pine, separated from the rest and looking like a huge sunshade, spread out its dull green canopy; then suddenly we reached the border of the forest some three hundred feet above the gorge that led to the wild valley of Niolo.
A few old, deformed trees seemed to have climbed painfully up the two lofty summits that dominated the pass, like pioneers in advance of the multitude crowding behind. As we turned round we saw the whole of the forest stretching out beneath us like an immense bowl of verdure, the edge of which seemed to touch the sky and was composed of bare rocks that formed a high wall all round.
We started off again and reached the gorge ten minutes later. There I saw an amazing sight. There was a valley beyond another forest, such as I had never seen before: ten miles of petrified solitude hollowed out between two mountains seven thousand feet high, and never a field or a tree to be seen. This was Niolo, the house of Corsican liberty, the inaccessible citadel from which the invader has never been able to eject the mountain-dwellers.
My companion said: “All our bandits take refuge there, too.” We soon reached the bottom of the wild, rugged slit whose beauty no words could express.
Not a blade of grass, not a single plant; granite, nothing but granite. So far as the eye could reach stretched a desert of sparkling granite heated as hot as an oven by the fierce sun that seemed purposely suspended over this gorge of stone. The sight of the crests of the mountains brought one up at a sharp turn, thrilled to the marrow. They looked red and jagged like festoons of coral (for the summits are of porphyry), and the sky overhead seemed violet, lilac, faded by the proximity of those strange-looking mountains. Lower down, the granite was of sparkling grey, and under our feet it was like grated, crushed powder, we were walking on gleaming dust. To the right a roaring torrent rushed along, scolding, as it followed its long and winding course. You cannot avoid stumbling in the heat, the blinding light of that dry, burning, rugged valley, divided by the turbulent stream hurriedly trying to escape, unable to fertilise the rocks, lost in a furnace that licks it up greedily without ever being refreshed or moistened.
Suddenly on our right we saw a little wooden cross stuck in a heap of stones. A man had been killed there and I said to my companion: “Tell me about your bandits.”
He continued: “I knew the most celebrated, the most terrible one, Sainte-Lucie; I will tell you about him.
“His father was killed in a quarrel by a young man of the same district, so it was said, and Sainte-Lucie was left with an only sister. He was a little chap, weak and fainthearted; he was often ill and had no energy whatever, and he did not declare a vendetta against his father’s assassin. And though his relations came and begged him to avenge his loss, he was deaf to their threats and pleading.
“According to an old Corsican custom, his indignant sister took away his black clothes so that he might not wear mourning for the unavenged dead. To this insult he remained indifferent, and rather than take down his father’s still-loaded gun he shut himself up and never went out, afraid to face the contemptuous glances of his comrades.
“Months went by and he seemed to have entirely forgotten the crime, he went on living with his sister in their own house. Well, a day came when the suspected assassin was to be married, but even this news did not seem to trouble Sainte-Lucie, and the fiancé, probably out of bravado, passed the house of the two orphans on his way to church.
“Seated by the window, the brother and sister were eating little fried cakes when the young man noticed the wedding procession. Seized with a fit of trembling, he got up without saying a word, took down the gun, and left the house. Talking about what happened later, he said: ‘I don’t know what was the matter with me. I felt my blood boiling; I felt it had to be, that, in spite of everything, I could not resist the inevitable, and I went and hid the gun in the thicket on the Corte road.’
“An hour later he came back without the gun, looking tired and sad, as usual. His sister thought he had forgotten all about his father, but at nightfall he disappeared.
“The enemy, with his two groomsmen, was going to Corte that evening. As they were walking along, singing gaily, suddenly Sainte-Lucie rose up in front of them and, staring at the murderer, shouted: ‘The time has come!’ and shot him point-blank through the lungs.
“One of the groomsmen fled; the other, looking at Sainte-Lucie, said: ‘What is the matter with you?’ and as he was going for help Saint-Lucie shouted: ‘If you move another step I will break your leg.’ The other, knowing how cowardly he had always been, said: ‘You dare not!’ and started off, but fell to the ground immediately with a bullet through his leg.
“Sainte-Lucie went up to him and said: ‘I am going to look at the wound; if it is not serious I will leave you here, if mortal I will finish you off.’ He looked at the wound and decided it to be mortal, then slowly reloaded his gun, told the man to say a prayer, and shot him through the head.
“The next day he went up into the mountains.
“And what do you think Sainte-Lucie did afterwards?
“His relations were all arrested: his uncle, the priest who was suspected of inciting him to vengeance, was sent to prison on a charge made by the dead fiancé’s relations, but he escaped and with a gun joined his nephew in the forest.
“One after the other, Sainte-Lucie killed his uncle’s accusers, and plucked out their eyes, to teach others never to swear to anything they had not seen themselves.
“He killed all his enemy’s relatives and their friends, he murdered fourteen policemen, and burnt down the houses of his opponents, and until his death was the most terrible of all the bandits known.”
The sun was disappearing behind Monte Cinto, and the broad shadow of the granite mountain lay over the granite of the valley. We hurried along so as to reach the little village of Albertace—a heap of stones riveted to the granite sides of the wild gorge. I said, thinking of the bandit: “Your vendetta is a dreadful thing!”
My companion replied mildly: “It can’t be helped, a man must do his duty!”