In the early 1890s, Vuillier sailed for Corsica. This came after Andorra, his second report for the travel magazine Le Tour du Monde. He left with his head full of images of vendettas and bandits, which would gradually lose their grip on him as he got closer to the beings and things he met along the way. He attended the funeral ritual of a woman who died of consumption and was particularly interested in the role of female voceratrice, which he described at length in the second issue before focusing on all funeral rituals and reports on death (pp. 228-234). While his story is sometimes of an astonishing ethnographic quality, it also remains tinged with an atmosphere of tragedy, violence and death, nourished by multiple anecdotes. Thus, on the morals of shepherds, he recounts how he found himself isolated from his companions and coming across the corpse of a shepherd on horseback who was being brought home: “An old man, dressed in a large pelone (cape), sat like a ghost on a horse, all trembling and frightened. This old man was rigid and very pale with his head held high and his eyes closed: he was a corpse. A fork attached to the saddle supported his chin, and through the folds of his coat I saw ropes and pieces of wood that held his torso.” (pp. 237-238 and engraving p. 233).
For further reading, see Lucie Desideri’s article on Gaston Vuillier in Corsica, « In Corsica. The traveller-artist ».