Napoleon

For on the 9th of May, I 769, Pasquale Paoli, with the Corsican militia, had taken the field against the French for the last time ; not long afterwards an English ship conveyed the defeated general to Naples, and that was the end of the freedom of Corsica. It was on the I sth of August in the same year, the feast of the Assumption, that Lretitia Ramolino, the young and beautiful wife of Carlo Buonaparte, gave birth to her illustrious son.

These words were addressed to no less a personage than Paoli himself, then an exile in England. They formed the first line of the first letter that the young Buonaparte ever wrote to the hero of Corsica, whom he regarded as the incarnation of patriotism; he wrote it on the 12th of June, I789; that is to say, in the hour when France, who had robbed Corsica of her freedom, was herself on the brink of disaster.

The States General, called together by the King, had been assembled at Versailles since May, and on the 1oth of June the Abbe Sieves, the leader of the Third Estate, had called upon its representatives to constitute themselves the government of the country.