The name of Gaffori is Corte's fairest ornament, and his little house, still standing pierced with balls, the most splendid monument the city can show. This house preserves another heroic association, connected with Gaffori's brave and high-souled wife. The Genoese, whose constant policy it was to use the families of dreaded Corsicans as hostages, and to oppose natural affection to love of country, on one occasion took advantage of Gaffori's absence from home to attack his house, in order to secure the person of his wife. But she instantly barricaded the door and window, and, with a few friends who had hurried to her assistance, defended herself, musket in hand, for days against the Genoese, who showered a storm of bullets upon the house. The little garrison was reduced to the utmost extremity, and her friends counselled her to capitulate; Gaffori's wife, however, conveyed a cask of powder into a cellar, and seizing a match, swore that she would blow up the house the moment they ceased to fire upon the besiegers. Her friends, who knew her desperate courage, continued their resistance, and at length Gaffori himself appeared with a band of Corsicans, and rescued his wife. After the murder of Gaffori, this woman took his son, the boy who had once been bound to the walls of the castle, and made him swear to hate the Genoese and avenge his father. Hamilcar did the same with his son Hannibal in ancient times. In this house of Gaffori's, Carlo Bonaparte lived with his wife Letitia in 1778; it was a house worthy to give origin to a Napoleon. Many memories of Paoli are connected with a house which bears the name of the Palazzo de Corte, and was the seat of Paoli's government, and his residence. Here is the room in which he worked, a mean-looking little place enough, as beseemed the legislator of the Corsicans. They tell that the great man, who was not safe from the balls of the assassin, kept the windows of this room always barricaded; and in fact, the window-shutters are still to be seen lined with cork, as they were in his time. The National Assembly had decreed him a guard of twenty-four men, acting in this like the ancient democracies of Greece; he had another body-guard always in the room beside him, consisting of six Corsican dogs. I cannot help being reminded here of his contemporary and admirer Frederick the Great, and how he too, in his cabinet, was always surrounded by dogs; but these were kept for amusement or ornament merely—the pretty Biche, and the graceful Alcmene, and other greyhounds. The scene is characteristically different. If Paoli were painted in the company of his dogs, as Frederick the Great has so often been represented surrounded by his, it would make rather a wild picture: the Corsican hero in his mean-looking cabinet, writing by the fireplace, wrapped in a coarse woollen gown, behind a barricaded window, grim, shaggy wolf-hounds crouched upon the floor—there we have a Corsican historical _genre_ painting.