His father, a Swiss officer in the service of the Genoese Republic, had married the mother of Laetitia Bonaparte, after the decease of her first husband.
Drawn gradually by that family into espousing the French cause against Paoli and the Anglophiles, he was forced to leave Corsica and to proceed with Laetitia and her son to Toulon, in the early part of the autumn of 1793.
She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Wyse, British plenipotentiary at Athens, and Laetitia Bonaparte, niece of Napoleon I.
The anecdotes of Swift related in Spence, Laetitia Pilkington, Wilson's Swiftiana, Delany's Autobiography, &c., though often amusing, can hardly be accepted as authentic.
Laetitia Casta is a natural beauty that has impressed the modeling world with her style and French exotic appeal.