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Rain and Telephone Calls

THE annual rain fall in the United States would weigh over three and one-half trillions of

tons.

This vast weight is drawn up to the clouds by the unseen but effective power of the sun; representing energy equivalent to 300 billion horse-power.

The annual telephone conversations total over twenty-five billion a year. As silently as sunlight, electricity, mastered by the human mind, carries the voices of the nation.

There must be the man-power of 300,000 individuals to build, maintain and operate the telephone system.

There must be the moneypower of over seven hundred million dollars a year to pay for operating the plant, in addition to three billion dollars invested in the plant.

The rain sustains life; the telephone furnishes swift communication for the nation, and they are alike in requiring a vast amount of unseen energy.

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IN ITS SEMI-CENTENNIAL YEAR THE BELL SYSTEM LOOKS FORWARD TO CONTINUED

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IN TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION

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THE CENTURY MAGAZINE; Published monthly: 50 cents a copy, $5.00 a year in the United States, $5.60 in Canada, and $6.00 in all other countries (postage included). Publication and circulation office, Concord, N. H. Editorial and advertising offices, 353 Fourth Avenue, New York, N. Y. Subscriptions may be forwarded to either of the above offices. Pacific Coast office, 327 Van Nuys Building, Los Angeles, California. W. Morgan Shuster, President; Dana H. Ferrin, Secretary; George L. Wheelock, Treasurer; James Abbott, Assistant Treasurer. Board of Trustees: George H. Hazen, Chairman; George C. Fraser; W. Morgan Shuster. The Century Co. and its editors receive manuscripts and art material, submitted for publication, only on the understanding that they shall not be responsible for loss or injury thereto while in their possession or in transit. All material herein published under copyright, 1926, by The Century Co. Title registered in the U. S. Patent Office. Entered as second-class matter August 18, 1920, at the U. S. post-office, Concord, N. H., under the act of March 3, 1879; entered also at the Post Office Department, Ottawa, Canada. Printed in U. S. A.

The CENTURY MAGAZINE

Vol 113

December 1926

No 2

I

THOSE QUARRELSOME BONAPARTES
I-Corsica and the Young Lieutenant

ROBERT GORDON ANDERSON

N THE late seventeen hundreds when the fall of the Bastille was a vivid memory, and the Reign of Terror still to come, a young man returned from his regiment in alien France to his home at Ajaccio in the island of Corsica. Of worldly goods, now that he had left his much-loved books packed up in quarters, he had nothing: that is, besides the junior lieutenant's uniform, rather worn, on his thin malarial figure; a few letters from some scarecrow Revolutionary officials in Paris; a much battered little portmanteau with a change of linen; and in his purse four months' pay or about three hundred francs.

It was little with which to carve one's fortune; but perhaps these things too should be noted about him: a quick incisive stride; an equally incisive way of giving orders, absurd in a youngster just turning twenty-one and five feet six inches; a sound knowledge of history, mathematics, and military tactics; and a pair of imperious eyes burning out of sallow, almost yellowish features. Also he had, when not sunk in the brooding melancholy that still held

over from adolescence, an air of unusual energy and, despite his unhealthy color and apparent frailty of frame, something of the iron and vitality of Plutarch's men. Outside of this equipment—and the dreams in his head—he had, then, precisely nothing.

Perhaps, however, he was to capitalize it in a way little suspected by his townspeople. Certainly they would have laughed, had any one prophesied such a thing; and they were at the time not at all proud of him. To be sure, they were a rather fractious, though a naturally kindly and hardy people, much given to suspicions and to feuds and little pleased with anybody. Then there were always too many factions on the island for any one to be generally popular, since one must take sides; and the Bonapartes up on the via Malerbe took sides rather violently. Besides, though they were of patrician descent and one of the leading families of Ajaccio, therefore to be looked up to, it is hard for either peasant or shopkeeper to reverence a family known all too well. Famil

Copyright, 1926, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

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iarity, after all, does breed a sort of contempt for one's betters, particularly in unsettled times when there are of necessity altercations over shopkeepers' bills and the ownership of flocks, vineyards, and what not, and when the neighbors recall quite clearly this same junior lieutenant and his brothers and sisters as an unruly lot and, if not actually tatterdemalion, at least dressed in none too well-fitting made-overs, fighting, biting, and scratching their playmates and each other, and in turn defending each other with equal violence.

Though one of the chief ports of the island, Ajaccio was, in those years, a small town and nothing to be particularly proud of. Still, it was decidedly picturesque as it lay in the golden sunshine, this late summer afternoon. And from the hills it all looked peaceful enough a slumbering fortress by the shore, the governor's palace and the cathedral towers, and a dozen squares or so of clustering dwellings, of varying heights, and gray and creamy, or old ivory in hue. As you looked down upon it, three wide chinks betrayed the elm- and plane-shaded avenues; and many narrow slits between the roofs showed innumerable little alleys, softened occasionally by the rounded green of mulberry, olive, citron, almond, and lemon; and all set down within a square mile of city wall-bastioned at the angles on the blue waters of the Gulf, with the snow coronals of the inland peaks visible, Naples fashion, beyond it to the East.

The scene then was serene enough seeming, particularly when you heard the bells of the cathedral and

of the Convent of San Francesco which lay outside the walls among the pasturing sheep and the vineyards. But if you left the governor's palace, built long before Genoa sold the island to France, and traversed the poorer quarters, past the hovels of stone and stucco, threading those tiny alleys roughly cobbled and sloping to gutters in the center, often channeling runnels of milk with bits of stale cheese and offal, you would come to the better section and see other signs. Here the houses, though they shouldered each other quite as closely, loomed taller and had the pleasant time-worn façades and lofty shuttered windows one sees on the Ile St.-Louis by the Seine or in old Tuscan cities. And here and there were peaceful old-time gardens. But if you looked closer, you might observe bullet-scars on the walls or holes made by cannon and now and then a ruin of black timbers and gray powdering mortar, overgrown with clambering myrtle and vines.

The Abbé Fesch, Napoleon's uncle, and half-brother to the young lieutenant's mother, Letizia, observed for the thousandth time these signs, as he made his clerical rounds. He saw also, when he came to a vantage-point on the wide Street of the Fountains, a felucca at anchor behind the mole. The two lateen spars were folded like peaceful curved quills on a background of waters of that hue which is neither ultramarine nor myrtle nor yet larkspur, simply Mediterranean blue, and which had, he thought as he fanned himself with his broad clerical hat, both peace and exaltation in it. But he saw on the deck the blue coats of the soldiers; others too were moving about the

citadel and on the corvette lying, with its single tier of guns, to windward of the felucca. And those uniforms belonged to France, which the abbé, like all good Corsicans, long had hated. Indeed, hadn't he as a boy, with all his kinsmen, been chased by the French out of the house on the via Malerbe, to camp on the top of Monte Rotondo he could see it now sparkling in the sunshine ten thousand feet above the sea? Two months, that was, before Napoleon was born.

The incongruity between serene setting and portentous atmosphere was even more apparent when he neared his cousin Ramolini's house. As he well knew, half of the army was loyal to the new National Assembly in Paris, half to the king, who sat, virtually a prisoner, blind to the oncoming deluge, mending his pet clocks in the Tuileries. And here in the market-place, officers in blue coats, white small-clothes, gilt epaulets, with red sashes around their waists, strode among the oliveskinned market women, now kicking aside their baskets of spinach or cabbage and cheese, again tossing gold coins, still stamped with the image of the king, on the shopkeepers' counters. Knots of citizens, some of them strange emissaries from Paris others bourgeois of the town, with red, white, and blue cockades in their triangle hats, stood in front of the Jacobin Club-that club which his nephews had so foolishly organized-foretelling with relish what would soon happen to those selfsame officers.

But as for most of the townspeople, they cared neither for Revolution nor for king, only for Corsica

and Paoli, old Papa Paoli who had fought so long against the French and who might yet fool them. The dark-eyed women drowsing among the baskets eyed both blue coats and red cockades with equal malevolence; an artisan sharpening his knife whetted its edge with too significant care. And here came riding into town hillmen from the interior-swart meager little fellows, clothed in scarlet and black coats and breeches made from the wool of their own black sheep, bestriding shaggy ponies, their women walking, in true Corsican fashion, on foot beside them. At each belt was a cartridge pouch and a stiletto, over each shoulder a gun; and each, when his eye lighted on these enemies of his country, muttered curses, sotto voce, as he rode.

It was an image of war in times of truce, and though Fesch himself was too orderly for that, he knew those brown-cowled priests he saw walking with militant stride, over the cobbles, had daggers under their girdles and quite near the crucifix.

The abbé sighed as he passed within the cool shadow of the city wall. Left to themselves, these Corsicans would have been peaceful enough. But what could you expect when since the Year One they had been harassed by invaders from every Mediterranean port and some from far beyond the seas?

The Bonapartes, too, though the boys were meddling with these revolutionary upstarts, were true Corsicans, having come from Florence in 1529, 1529, the Ramolinis, the abbe's mother's people, from the same. town. As for himself, he had only a half-measure of the strain. His mother and Letizia's were the same;

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