Perhaps it was meant, that crushing disappointment, for there is no saying, in the light of the conditions which reigned at the capital, whether he would ever have reached the sanctuary of the allies at all. The White Terror, a plague as fierce and irresponsible as the Red one of a quarter of a century earlier, was raging uncontrolled and uncontrollable, and the deeds of Murat, as King of Naples in 1814, would not have counted then for the Emperor’s broken Marshal. Fouché’s agents very nearly caught him that time, and he had to fly from cover to cover like a hunted hare; but he escaped from them, and a while later slipped away in a little ship that was bound for Corsica. Even now the demon of his ill luck, still unsatiated, continued to pursue him, for, after two days, a storm overtook them which forced them to lower their single, three-cornered sail, and let the boat run under bare poles for a day and a half, at the end of which time, when the little ship was filling rapidly, they were picked up by the _Corriera_ on her way to Bastia. A large French vessel which they had spoken a few hours earlier had refused to have anything to do with them, and, when this other one, more charitable, came alongside, Murat, uncovering his face, told the captain his name. “A Frenchman,” he said, “I speak to Frenchmen, and, nearly shipwrecked, I ask aid from those who are themselves out of danger.” Greatly to his surprise and his gratification, he was treated with every honour and welcomed on board as a king, and the next day he landed at Bastia. He had come at a moment when Corsica was in the throes of a civil war of its own, between the followers of the Bourbons, the adherents of Napoleon, and a party who, sitting on the fence between, called themselves Independents. Many of Murat’s old-time companions in arms had been natives of Corsica, and, the Napoleonists and Independents being in the majority, they called upon Joachim to help them crush the remainder and rule over the island afterwards. This was the sort of invitation which the fiery cavalryman was always only too ready to accept, and his heart soared into the heavens! One begins to understand the reason why Napoleon could hold all Europe down when one reads the adventures of Murat and Ney and Soult. Even when the great force behind them was removed, and they were struggling single-handed, while the least and weakest chance remained to continue fighting they would fight. They never counted the odds, they never parleyed with a compromise, repeated defeats never cooled their courage; they would follow as hard upon the faintest ray of hope as they had galloped into the blazing sunlight of an assured victory.