I AWOKE with the smell of the maquis coming through the porthole: sweet, heavy and elusive. More nostalgic and haunting, for those who have succumbed to it, than almost any other smell in the world, it was possible to imagine what it meant to Napoleon on Elba, those clear mornings when a south-west wind came off a sea like scraped glass and the lonely exile climbed the chestnut-wooded slopes of Poggio to smell it. Perhaps he really did smell it, through the fisheries of Marciana Marina, the smoke of Portoferraio; perhaps it was simply desire and memory, rehearsed into something more powerful than reality. At any rate, he deserved to be refreshed by it, as he claims he was, on those days when the physical need to see his native island was so strong that he had to breast the western skyline of Elba and hope for the blue shadows of the hills above Bastia to greet him across forty miles of water. For these seas round Corsica are somehow specifically Napoleon’s; though he rarely used them, and then badly, they bear the impress of his dreams and conquests, his failure, and his melancholy. Lower down, in the Straits of Bonifacio, we enter Nelson’s territorial waters, but no one, coming past the Îles Sanguinaires into the great mauve bowl made by the mountains round Ajaccio, can fail to see it all in Napoleon’s terms.

We had sailed from Nice in darkness the night before, edging out of the narrow Italianate port, where Garibaldi had been born, with the glow of sunset fading like transfers off the wharfside houses and the lights coming out in bars and restaurants along the quay. We swung across the Baie des Anges, the tinsel glitter of the Promenade des Anglais stretching out behind us like a lower and congested horizon of stars, and moved into a half-gale. The Sampiero Corso, eleven thousand tons and heavily loaded, met it easily enough, but the fourth-class passengers lying out along the holds under the creaking winches, caught the finest edge off the spray. All, as the blue-jowled and portly second mate bawled at them, included in the ticket.

By the time we were fully clear of the coast, it had begun to drizzle. I remembered how hot it had been when, at the exact date, mid-August, I had made the same journey five years ago. This time it was barely warm, and the rows of Corsicans going home for their annual leave huddled in their unrolled duffle-bags.

Now, as I went on deck, the swell of the night before had subsided and the sea had the pallid but relaxed look of hang-over. On the port beam the îles Sanguinaires lay a mile or so distant, grey lumps of land like drowning camels as the water seemed to cut them off at the neck. Daudet has written about them, and de Maupassant, and they play their part in the small but select literature of Corsica, made up by Mérimée’s Colomba, Boswell’s uneven and somewhat pontifical Account, Edward Lear’s endearing Journal of a Landscape Painter.

The sun had only just risen and we were sailing straight into it as it dipped its first rays like the beam of a lamp on the hillsides sweeping down to the wide, conical Bay of Ajaccio.

Ajaccio, as we grew near, seemed to have grown since I had last seen it. The suburbs looked to have climbed higher up the close green curl of the nearer hills and to have spread themselves further along the road towards the beaches to the west. Yet, as we swung round into it, with the sun clarifying perspectives against the central range of mountains, it was still recognizably the same town as rises with graceful symmetry from eighteenth-century engravings; a town beautifully shaped at the foot of high hills, encircled by mountains and within them, at water-level, the long arms of moles and jetties. Sailing-boats, with dawn on their sails like a painted colour, lay in neat rows: cobalt, saffron, emerald, pink, doubling their hulls in watered reflection. And, further along, under the palm-trees squatly planted by the old harbour walls, the fishing-boats seemed, like coarser children, to be segregated in their dark colours from the lifting elegance of the yachts.

On my last visit the heat had been suffocating. The sun beat down week after week from skies of a blue so transparent they seemed burned in bronze. The island had been becalmed, paralysed in all its faculties, except that of argument. Refuse and fruit had rotted in the streets because no one could be bothered to take it away. Corsica, in any case, was an island that people went away from, not a showpiece for visitors. This slight self-pity of the Corsicans, the provincial’s or colonial’s self-pity for the neglect of his département, combined with a natural pride of race, produced a curious alternation of arrogance and deprecation. Something had happened in the past, something would doubtless happen again; but in the meantime the absence of history had left a kind of apathy, an endemic nihilism.

I had experienced this feeling strongly in 1947. Corsica was then comparatively fresh from liberation, still full of heroic admiration for de Gaulle, who had strode magnificently through the streets a couple of years earlier, the first Allied General to set foot on Corsican soil. Then Ajaccio had been covered in political posters, the cafés and bars noisy with violent dialectic, obscure side-streets scrawled with Vive de Gaulle and À Bas Thorez, le traître. The memory of Napoleon had suddenly come alive and everyone was eager to tell stories about heroes of the past like Paoli and Sampiero, and to recount wild feats of recent resistance in the war just over. Here, they said, two Germans were shot; there, a British submarine landed secret agents on a moonless night and was provisioned by men of the Corsican maquis; and over in that bar an American had been strangled for making advances to a Corsican girl. For a moment the links of history seemed to have been joined up into some recognizable continuity; then just as suddenly they snapped. And my main recollection of the great Place de Gaulle, overlooking the western arm of the harbour, had been its perpetual sense of doomed expectancy, the feeling that everyone was waiting for something to happen and that they had been waiting so long that all other purpose had been drained.

But when I had been ashore for some hours this time, I could see other changes. Things seemed more prosperous, the streets cleaner and neater. Before, Ajaccio had seemed very much an outpost, a garrison town: a training-ground where soldiers came to do their military service, a post for a young officer to sweat away a few years on his way to promotion, perhaps dreaming of a Staff job in Paris or action in Indo-China. Mostly, it had seemed a convenient stopping-place for aircraft on the Marseilles—North Africa run, and as we lay stunned by the heat on the golden beaches of Calvi or Porto or Propriano, worn out by tiring journeys into the interior, we had seen so many aeroplanes, day in day out, that I had thought of calling the book I later wrote (under the title of Time Was Away) The Airfield of Olives—a title, like most author’s original titles, rejected by the publisher.

Then, Ajaccio had seemed a perfect setting for a seedy novel about expatriates by Maugham or Simenon. There was a formidable black market, especially in drugs; and we had once got mixed up in a journey by lorry, paying the driver exorbitantly to take us to Piana when the normal transport had gone, only to find ourselves wedged amongst sacks of contraband flour, at that time the most valuable of all forms of barter or currency. We had, as a result, to wait in the mountains until nightfall before it, and we, could be safely unloaded.

Now de Gaulle’s promise had failed to materialize, and the urgency had gone out of politics. Also the need for a black market. Doubtless the small white packages, with their magic powers, still went their rounds when the ships came in from Africa, but in the meantime there were more obvious diversions. A thriving tourist industry, its main centres at Calvi, île Rousse, Bonifacio and Porto, had left its decisive traces on Ajaccio, and as a result the shops, and prices, were beginning to compete with those of Saint-Tropez and Cannes, Portofino and Capri.

It was all, no doubt, inevitable, if saddening. Perhaps the weather, too, contributed to my feeling of regret. For by now, clouds had hit the mountains with determined firmness and as they piled up a steady rain dripped through the plane-trees on the Cours Mirabeau under them. The hills were soon lost and by lunch-time mist had left the town as if floating on a fog-bound raft. The sea was a kind of mauve bruise and the coastline to the south could only be sensed under its moist and woolly blanket. Sometimes an occasional gust of maquis came through, purified and sweetened, to remind us that we were on an island.

*

Later that evening the weather cleared and we walked down through the exotic trees in the garden of the Grand Hotel, past rows of crowded cafés, their tables cluttered with brightly coloured ices, to where the buses left for the beaches—that string of superb sandy coves with beautiful names, Ariadne, Scudo, Marinella … and as good as any in the Mediterranean. In the bus I was reminded of the loveliness of Corsican girls, a curiously fragile loveliness nearly always left behind in early...