hundreds of honest families.  But in 1543 a second Joan of Arc was raised up by Providence to deliver the Nicois in the person of the still popular heroine, Catterina Segurana.  Francis I. had recently scandalized Christendom by allying himself with the famous Mohammedan corsair, Barbarossa of Algiers with a view of reconquering Nice, which he considered the key of Italy.  Accordingly, one fine morning three hundred vessels belonging to the Algerine pirate entered the neighboring port of Villefranche, and presently the whole country was filled with a horde of turbaned freebooters.  Cimiez, Montboron, Mont Gros and a hundred other villages and hamlets were soon alive with French marauders and Turkish pirates, who presently proceeded to bombard the city itself.  The siege was short, but terrible, and the inhabitants were at the last gasp when the energetic Catterina Segurana, a washer-woman by trade, and surnamed Mao faccia ("Ugly face"), on account of the homeliness of her countenance, seized a hatchet, and, after a vigorous address to her fellow-citizens, placed herself at their head and led them against the enemy.  The same result attended her efforts as did those of her immediate prototype, the glorious Maid of Orleans.  She so animated the people, so roused their patriotism, that before the day was over the French and infidels were conquered, and the bold and generous Catterina. stood surrounded by her enthusiastic fellow-citizens, waving the conquered Algerine flag, in token of victory, from the summit of the castle hill, on the spot where formerly stood her statue.[001]

From the time of the brave Catterina to our own, Nice has sustained at least a dozen sieges of more or less severity.  That of 1706 was perhaps one of the most shocking on record.  The city, by the treaty of Turin of 1696, had once more passed under the protectorate of the dukes of Savoy, but the French, who have always had a longing eye for the “Department of the Maritime Alps,” as they even then called it, broke the treaty they had themselves framed, and sent the duc de la Feuillade over the frontier with twenty thousand men to conquer the country.  Nice was then governed by the marquis de Caraglio, who, although entreated by the enemy to allow the women and children to leave the city’s gates, positively refused to do so.  The consequence was that during the siege, which lasted six months, more than a third of the inhabitants perished from starvation.  Men are said to have killed their wives for food, and women their children.  Sixty thousand shells fell in various parts of the town, and the castle, cathedral and many churches were entirely destroyed.[002]