"O unhappy fellow-citizens, what detestable intrigues were you to be the victims of! You would not have understood them till it was too late. Where were your means of withstanding, without arms, ten thousand men? You yourselves would have signed the act of your degradation, hope would have fled, hope would have been extinguished, and days of misery would have succeeded each other without intermission. Liberated France would have looked on you with contempt, afflicted Italy with indignation, and Europe, astonished at a humiliation so profound, would have torn from her annals the pages that do your virtues honour. But the deputies of your communes penetrated the design, and put you on your guard in time. A king, who has constantly desired only the happiness of his people, informed by Monsieur Lafayette, that steadfast friend of liberty, of the true state of the case, was able to crush the perfidious machinations of a minister whom revenge ceaselessly spurred on to injure you. Ajaccio showed itself resolute in its address; the lamentable condition into which the most despotic of all governments had brought you had there been so powerfully impressed on people's minds. The hitherto slumbering Bastia awoke at the sound of danger, and seized its weapons with that resolution which has ever characterized it. Arena came from Paris to Balagna full of those sentiments which make a man capable of undertaking everything, and of fearing no danger. His weapons in the one hand, the decrees of the National Assembly in the other, he made the people's enemies turn pale. Achille Murati, the conqueror of Capraja, who carried despair into Genoa itself, and who wanted but opportunity and a wider field to be a Turenne, reminded the sharers of his fame that it was time to win it over again, and that their country needed—not intrigue, which it never understood—but steel and fire. Before the rising din of a resistance so universal, Gaffori withdrew into the nothingness from which intrigue had made him emerge against his will. He remained trembling in the fortress of Corte. Narbonne hastened away from Lyons to bury his shame and his hellish plans in Rome. A few days later, and Corsica is linked to France, Paoli is recalled, and in a single instant your prospects are changed, and a new career offered you for which you would never have ventured to hope.