On the other hand, with no apparent regard for his personal advancement by marriage, he followed his own inclination, and in 1764, at the age of eighteen, gallantly wedded a beautiful child of fifteen, Maria Letizia Ramolino. Her descent, though excellent and, remotely, even noble, was inferior to that of her husband, but her fortune was equal, if not superior, to his. Her father was a Genoese official of importance; her mother, daughter of a petty noble by a peasant wife, became a widow in 1755 and two years later was married again to Francis Fesch, a Swiss, captain in the Genoese navy. Of this union, Joseph, later Cardinal Fesch, was the child. Although well born, the mother of Napoleon had no education and was of peasant nature to the last day of her long life--hardy, unsentimental, frugal, avaricious, and sometimes unscrupulous. Yet for all that, the hospitality of her little home in Ajaccio was lavish and famous. Among the many guests who were regularly entertained there was Marbeuf, commander in Corsica of the first army of occupation. There was long afterward a malicious tradition that the French general was Napoleon's father. The morals of Letizia di Buonaparte, like those of her conspicuous children, have been bitterly assailed, but her good name, at least, has always been vindicated. The evident motive of the story sufficiently refutes such an aspersion as it contains. Of the bride's extraordinary beauty there has never been a doubt. She was a woman of heroic mold, like Juno in her majesty; unmoved in prosperity, undaunted in adversity. It was probably to his mother, whom he strongly resembled in childhood, that the famous son owed his tremendous and unparalleled physical endurance.