Sartene suffered terribly from the Saracens. The Moors, after repeated attacks, surprised the town in the year 1583, and in one day carried off four hundred persons into captivity—the third part of the population at that time. From that date, Sartene has been defended by a strong wall. To-day, standing in this quiet town, whose inhabitants are talking peacefully together under the large elm-tree, in the quaint, idyllic market-place, one cannot believe that revenge and the fiercer passions could find a lurking-place within its walls. And yet this town, after the Revolution of July, was for many years the scene of a horrible civil war. The citizens have been divided, since the year 1815, into two parties—the adherents of the family of Rocca Serra, and those of the family of Ortoli. The former party is composed of the richer inhabitants, who live in the quarter of Santa Anna; the latter, of the poorer classes occupying the Borgo. Both factions had intrenched themselves, barred their houses, shut their windows, and proceeded to make sorties upon each other, to shoot and to stab one another with the most furious zeal. The Rocca Serrans were the Whites or Bourbonists, the Ortoli the Reds or Liberals; the former had forbidden the opposite party admission into their quarter of the town; and the Ortoli, in contempt of this declaration, had formed a procession, and marched with flags flying into Santa Anna. The Rocca Serrans immediately ran to their arms, and shot at the procession from their windows, killed three men and wounded several others. This was the signal for a bloody combat. The day after, several hundred mountaineers came with their guns to the assistance of the Ortoli, and besieged Santa Anna. The Government despatched a body of soldiers, which had the effect of apparently restoring order. Both parties, however, continued hostilities, and many lives were lost on both sides. The hostile feeling continues to this day, although, after thirty-three years of deadly feud, the Rocca Serrans and the Ortoli, on the occasion of the election of Louis Napoleon as President, held a meeting of reconciliation, where their children were allowed to dance together. Corsica, with these inextinguishable family feuds, presents the same picture as the Italian cities of Florence, Bologna, Verona, Padua, and Milan, several centuries ago. The Italian Middle Ages still survive in this island; and here still rage the same tumults described so picturesquely by Dino Compagni in his chronicles of Florence—that war of fellow-citizens, whom, as Dante complains, the same ditch surrounds and the same wall defends. But in Corsica, these feuds are much more remarkable and more terrible; raging, as they do, in districts of so small an extent, in villages with a population of not above one thousand souls, the inhabitants of which are indissolubly connected by the ties of blood and hospitality.