I vowed to return one day and give it the full attention it deserved. Shamefully, it took the best part of half a century for me to accomplish that second visit. The island that awaited me seemed scarcely to have been touched by the advances of mass tourism and questionable architecture such as have afflicted other beautiful islands, from Mallorca to Rhodes. Back in the UK I thought the time was ripe for me to probe further into the reasons for this welcome lack of development.
The following account was first published in The New European. She tossed this incendiary remark into our conversation without so much as the kind of look that might acknowledge that her grenade might shock me; nor even a wry smile. I had just returned to the French mainland after a week immersed in the extraordinary beauty of Corsica and the warmth of its people.
I dismissed her remark at the time as hearsay or hyperbole. But Corsica is a place that exists in two parallel universes, and the more I get to know about one of these, the more her words acquire the ring of possible truth, even likelihood.
The acceptable face of Corsica is a rare natural beauty, towering and inaccessible mountains, drained by endless ravines flushed by ice-cold waters, tumbling down to turquoise seas, in turn fringed by endless bays of golden sand. I meet a man, whom for reasons that will become apparent I shall call simply Pierre Le Brun. A Parisian who lived and worked on the island for many years, he tells me how he saw both his hotel and his car torched, on various occasions, yet still finds himself drawn back.
Statue of Pascal Paoli at Corte, the old capital. Corsica today boasts the highest per capita murder rate in Europe, combined with a near-zero detection and conviction rate that would probably put Mexico to shame. An English friend who worked there for a time in the s told me how a German family was building a large home by the coast.
