connections: 'It will do,' said all of them, 'it's amongst ourselves,
it is one of our own families...'" When the Pope later hesitated about
coming to Paris to crown Napoleon, "the Italian party in the Conclave
prevailed against the Austrian party by supporting political arguments
with the following slight tribute to national amour propre: 'After all
we are imposing an Italian family on the barbarians, to govern them.
We are revenging ourselves on the Gauls.'" Significant words, which
will one day throw light upon the depths of the Italian nature, the
eldest daughter of modern civilization, imbued with her right of
primogeniture, persisting in her grudge against the transalpines, the
rancorous inheritor of Roman pride and of antique patriotism.[7]

From Sarzana, a Bonaparte emigrates to Corsica, where he establishes
himself and lives after 1529. The following year Florence is taken
and subjugated for good. Henceforth, in Tuscany, under Alexander de
Medici, then under Cosmo I. and his successors, in all Italy under
Spanish rule, municipal independence, private feuds, the great
exploits of political adventures and successful usurpations, the
system of ephemeral principalities, based on force and fraud, all give
way to permanent repression, monarchical discipline, external order,
and a certain species of public tranquility. Thus, just at the time
when the energy and ambition, the vigorous and free sap of the Middle
Ages begins to run down and then dry up in the shriveled trunk,[8] a
small detached branch takes root in an island, not less Italian but
almost barbarous, amidst institutions, customs, and passions belonging
to the primitive medieval epoch,[9] and in a social atmosphere
sufficiently rude for the maintenance of all its vigor and harshness.
- Grafted, moreover, by frequent marriages, on the wild stock of the
island, Napoleon, on the maternal side, through his grandmother and
mother, is wholly indigenous. His grandmother, a Pietra-Santa,