On the same market-place, behind the fountain, close upon the harbour and before the handsome town-house, stands a marble statue of Napoleon, on an excessively high and disagreeably tapering pedestal of granite. The inscription is as follows: "His native city to the Emperor Napoleon, on the 5th May 1850, the second year of the presidency of Louis Napoleon." Ajaccio had long been endeavouring to raise a monument to Napoleon, and always in vain. The arrival of a statue in Corsica was therefore an event of no small importance for the island. It chanced that the Bonaparte family on one occasion sent Signor Ramolino the statue of a Ganymede. The people seeing it as it was taken out of the vessel, took the eagle of Ganymede for the imperial eagle, and Ganymede himself for Napoleon; they assembled in the market-place, and demanded that the statue should forthwith be placed on the above-mentioned fountain, that they might at last have the great Napoleon in marble in the market-place. The worthy Corsicans, in thus turning the Trojan youth Ganymede into their countryman Napoleon, certainly seem to give some colour to the old fable of the chroniclers, that the Ajaccians are descended from a Trojan prince. The beautiful statue of Napoleon, by the Florentine Bartolini, was originally intended for Ajaccio; but a disagreement arose about the price (60,000 francs), and Bartolini's work never became one of the ornaments of Ajaccio. The statue of Napoleon in the market-place is by Laboureur, and is only of mediocre merit; but its position, in full view of the gulf, gives it an admirable local effect. It is a consular statue. The consul looks from the pedestal upon the sea, turning from his little native town to the world-embracing element. He wears the Roman toga, and on his head a wreath of bays; his right hand grasps a rudder, which rests upon a ball representing the globe. The idea is happy; for in sight of the gulf the rudder appears a quite natural symbol, and is doubly significant in the hand of an islander. The mind of the beholder dwells here not on the history of the complete, but of the incipient ruler; for he sees around him the little world of Ajaccio, in which the mightiest European man went about as child and youth, unconscious who he was, and for what fate had destined him. Then the memory wanders from the market-place to the gulf, and sees the ship anchor there, which bore the General Napoleon Bonaparte from Egypt to France. During the night he sat on board that vessel, eagerly reading such newspapers as could be procured for him in Ajaccio; and it was here that he formed the resolution to seize that rudder with which he was to rule not France alone, but an empire and a hemisphere, till it broke in his hand, and the man of Corsica went to wreck on the island of St. Helena.