No marble tablet tells the stranger who has come from Italy, where the houses of great men always bear inscriptions, that he stands before the house of the Bonapartes. He knocks in vain at the door; no voice answers, and all the windows are closely veiled with gray jalousies, as if the house were in a state of siege from the Vendetta. Not a human being is stirring upon the square; a deathlike stillness rests upon the neighbourhood, as if the name of Napoleon had frightened it into silence, or scared all else away. At length an old man appeared at the window of a house close by, and requested me to return in two hours, when he should be able to give me the key. Bonaparte's house, which has, I am assured, sustained but slight alteration, though no palace, has plainly been the dwelling of a patrician family. Its appearance shows this, and it is without doubt a palace compared with the village-cabin in which Pasquale Paoli was born. It is roomy, handsome, and convenient. But the rooms are destitute of furniture; the tapestries alone have been left on the walls, and they are decayed. The floor, which, as is usual in Corsica, is laid out in small hexagonal red flags, is here and there ruinous. The darkness produced in the rooms by the closed jalousies, and their emptiness, made them quite dismal. Once, in the time of the beautiful Letitia, this house was alive with the busy stir of a numerous family, and brilliant with joyous hospitality. Now, it is like a tomb, and in vain you look around you for a single object on which fancy may hang associations with the history of its enigmatic inhabitants. The naked walls can tell no tale. I do not know when the Casa Bonaparte was erected, but it can hardly be very old. It was built, no doubt, when the Genoese were supreme in the island, perhaps when Louis Quatorze was filling the world with his own fame, and with the fame of France. I thought of the time when the master of the craftsmen who erected it pronounced over the house, on its completion, the customary blessing, and when, according to ancient usage, the family for whom it had been built was solemnly conducted into it by an assemblage of kinsfolk—all alike unconscious that the whim of fortune would one day shower upon its roof the crowns of kingdoms and of empires, and that it was yet to cradle the race of princes who were to share among them the thrones of a continent.