A young Corsican lieutenant comes home from the French army to find his sister has kept the vendetta warm for both of them — his father was shot from behind a wall, and Colomba knows exactly who did it and what a brother is for. Mérimée was inspector-general of historical monuments for twenty years and saved Vézelay and Carcassonne from ruin; he wrote Corsica after a tour of inspection, and the maquis in this book is a legal institution.