Universal Classics Library (Volume 1)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MEMOIRS OF MADAME JUNOT DUCHESS OF ABRANTES CHAPTER I. Place and Date of My Birth?Calomeros and Bonaparte ? My Father's Departure for America?Intimacy between My Mother and Madame L: etitiu ? Bonaparte's Boyhood ? The Basket of Grapes and the Flogging ? Saveria and the Bonaparte Family ? My Father's Return ? My Birth and My Mother's Illness. I Was born at Montpellier on the 6th of November, 1784. My family was then temporarily established at Languedoc, to enable my father the more easily to exercise the duties of an official appointment which he had obtained on his return from America. My mother, like myself, was born beneath the tent which her parents had pitched in a foreign land. From the shores of the Bosphorus her family had emigrated to the solitudes of the Taygetes, which they quitted to inhabit the mountains of Corsica. When Constantine Comnenus landed in Corsica in 1676 at the head of the Greek colony, he had with him several sons, one of whom was named Calomeros. This son he sent to Florence, on a mission to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Constantine dying before the return of his son, the Grand Duke prevailed on the young Greek to renounce Corsica and fix his abode in Tuscany. After some interval of time, an individual named Calomeros came from Italy?indeed, from Tuscany, and fixed his abode in Corsica, where his descendants formed the family of Buonaparte; for the name Calomeros, literally Italianized, signified buona parte or bella parte The only question is, whether the Calomeros who left Corsica, and the Calomeros who came there, have a direct filiation. Napoleon omitted the u in Buonaparte while General-in-Chief in May, 1796. Two facts, however, are certain, namely, the departure of the one, and the arrival of the other. It is a singular circumst..