In the year 1750 this house was besieged by the Genoese. Gaffori was absent, and the defence of the home rested entirely upon his wife and servants. When the servants began to get frightened, and to talk of surrender, their mistress went into a lower room, got a barrel of powder and a torch, and threatened to blow herself and all the rest of them to pieces if they left off firing. The servants, under the circumstances, wisely continued their resistance, and held the Genoese in check until their master returned and drove the enemy away. It was in this house that Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, and afterwards King of Spain, was born. We escaped the crowd at last, and tried to find our way to the citadel. We wandered through winding streets and crooked alleys, and arrived as often as not at the end of a blind passage, blocked with manure-heaps and piles of disgusting refuse. Finally, guided by two or three small children, we clambered to the summit of a rock, from which the citadel could be seen on the other side of a deep but narrow valley. We were on the edge of a precipice unguarded by wall or railing, and on the edge of which the children skipped about as carelessly and as safely as their own mountain-goats. We turned our faces away from the children and their perilous amusements, in order to view the great citadel crowning a rock that rises up 400 feet sheer above the river that foams at its base. There were men inside the fort, but we could not see them. Doubtless there were guns too, but they, like the soldiers, were invisible. Not such was the scene in 1746, when Gaffori made up his mind to recapture the fort from the Genoese, who were then in possession of this mountain stronghold. There was noise enough then, as the brave General directed a steady and vigorous assault upon the walls. So skilful and so persistent was the attack that the Genoese commander began to have grave doubts as to his ability to hold the place. It so happened that amongst the prisoners within the fort was Gaffori’s youngest son. The Genoese leader ordered the boy to be brought out and bound to the outside of the walls, thinking that this would certainly put an end to the firing. For a moment his plan succeeded: the guns were silent; the Corsicans gazed in terror, first at the boy, and then at their horrified leader. But the period of peace passed quickly away. Gaffori, fear and resolution painfully mingled in his breast, shrieked the command, “Fire!” Out burst the artillery with redoubled fury. The fort was captured, and Gaffori was rewarded, not only with the possession of an ancient fort, but with the yet dearer treasure of a living son. Gaffori died, as so many of his countrymen have died, by the hand of an assassin, and the assassin was a man of this very town. But the inhabitants of Corté marked their horror of the deed by destroying the house of the murderer, and the spot where that house once stood remains bare unto this day. CHAPTER IX