I stood with Bella in the sunny piazza in Livorno, one noon in May. My wife had gone to buy French francs; the era of the euro had not yet arrived. I noted to the collie that this was a city full of pretty girls . . . but what were we getting into? A couple of Francophile friends, hearing we were bound for Corsica, suggested gently that we should remember that that was the place where they set off bombs. The top French official in the island, the Préfet de Corse, was assassinated at Ajaccio in 1998. Our children wondered why in heaven's name we had to take the dog along. Well, as to this last the answer was simple: the collie had never been to Corsica. Nor had we. We had often flown over the island after taking off from Rome for America, and its high mountains and cliff-backed coasts were appealing. We were giving ourselves a week there; that seemed ample time for an island not much over a hundred miles from north to south and about fifty miles wide. There would not be many tourists there in May. Most of the visitors to Corsica are French and Italians, and they go vacationing in July and August.

Nor did the occasional bombings, or the shooting of Claude Erignac, the prefect, worry us. The Corsican bombers' aim was independence, or at least more island autonomy. The main independence movement denied they had shot M. Erignac, but they did bomb French government offices and tourist developments being built without permits. They seemed to have, in part, ecological concerns. They would hardly go after an older American couple with a small Fiat and a collie.