a holy horror of excisemen and the police, stayed above on the cliff, because of a little coastguard station posted like a watchman on the shore.  I made for a large red building which still maintained, in this burning solitude its three stories, in spite of broken windows and ruinous tiles.  Over the worm-eaten door was an immense sign-board:  “Territorial Bank.  Carr——­bre——­54.”  The wind, the sun, the rain, have wiped out the rest.

There has been there, certainly, a commencement of operations, for a large square, gaping hole, cut out with a punch, is still open in the ground, showing along its crumbling sides, like a leopard’s spots, red slabs with brown veins, and at the bottom, in the brambles, enormous blocks of the marble, called in the trade “black-heart” (marble spotted with red and brown), condemned blocks that no one could make anything of for want of a road leading to the quarry or a harbour to make the coast accessible for freight ships, and for want, above all, of subsidies considerable enough to carry out one or the other of these two projects.  So the quarry remains abandoned, at a few cable-lengths from the shore, as cumbrous and useless as Robinson Crusoe’s canoe in the same unfortunate circumstances.  These details of the heart-rending story of our sole territorial wealth were furnished by a miserable caretaker, shaking with fever, whom I found in the low-ceilinged room of the yellow house trying to roast a piece of kid over the acrid smoke of a pistachio bush.

This man, who in himself is the whole staff of the Territorial Bank in Corsica, is Paganetti’s foster-father, an old lighthouse-keeper upon whom the solitude does not weigh.  Our director-general leaves him there partly for charity and partly because letters dated from the Taverna quarry, now and again, make a good show at the shareholders’ meetings.  I had the greatest difficulty extracting a little information from this poor creature, three parts savage, who looked upon me with cautious mistrust, half hidden behind the long hair of his goat-skin pelone.  He told me, however, without intending it, what the Corsicans understand by the word “railway,” and why they put on mysterious airs when they speak of it.  As I was trying to find out if he knew anything about the scheme for a railway in the country, this old man, instead of smiling knowingly like his compatriots, said, quite naturally, in passable French, his voice rusty and benumbed like an ancient, little-used lock: 

“Oh, sir, no need of a railway here.”

“But it would be most valuable, most useful; it would facilitate communications.”

“I don’t say no; but with the police we have enough here.”

“The policemen?”

“Certainly.”