You see, Paganetti is known in his native country.  The worth of his word is written on the square in Corte, still waiting for the monument to Paoli, on the vast fields of carrots which he has managed to plant on the Island of Ithaca, in the gaping empty purses of all those unfortunate small tradesmen, village priests, and petty nobility, whose poor savings he has swallowed up dazzling their eyes with chimerical combinazioni.  Truly, for him to dare to come back here, it needed all his phenomenal audacity, as well as the resources now at his disposal to satisfy all claims.

And, indeed, what truth is there in the fabulous works undertaken by the Territorial Bank?

None.

Mines, which produce nothing and never will produce anything, for they exist only on paper; quarries, which are still innocent of pick or dynamite, tracts of uncultivated sandy land that they survey with a gesture, telling you, “We begin here, and we go right over there, as far as you like.”  It is the same with the forests.  The whole of a wooded hill in Monte-Rotondo belongs to us, it seems, but the felling of the trees is impossible unless aeronauts undertake the woodman’s work.  It is the same with the watering-places, among which this miserable hamlet of Pozzonegro is one of the most important, with its fountain whose astonishing ferruginous properties Paganetti advertises.  Of the streamers, not a shadow.  Stay—­an old, half-ruined Genoese tower on the shore of the Gulf of Ajaccio bears on a tarnished escutcheon, above its hermetically sealed doors, this inscription:  “Paganetti’s Agency.  Maritime Company.  Inquiry Office.”  Fat, gray lizards tend the office in company with an owl.  As for the railways, all these honest Corsicans to whom I spoke of it smiled knowingly, replied with winks and mysterious hints, and it was only this morning that I had the exceedingly buffoonish explanation of all this reticence.

I had read among the documents which the director-general flaunts in our eyes from time to time, like a fan to puff up his impostures, the bill of sale of a marble quarry at a place said to be “Taverna,” two hours’ distance from Pozzonegro.  Profiting by our stay here, I got on a mule this morning, without telling any one, and guided by a tall scamp of a fellow with legs like a deer—­true type of a Corsican poacher or smuggler, his thick, red pipe in his mouth, his gun in a bandoleer—­I went to Taverna.  After a fearful progress across cracked rocks and bogs, past abysses of unsoundable depths—­on the very edges of which my mule maliciously walked as though to mark them out with her shoes—­we arrived, by an almost perpendicular descent, at the end of our journey.  It was a vast desert of rocks, absolutely bare, all white with the droppings of gulls and sea-fowl, for the sea is at the bottom, quite near, and the silence of the place was broken only by the flow of the waves and the shrill cries of the wheeling circles of birds.  My guide, who has