hopeless. But the sun had set red, and that presaged wind. There was no
time to be lost. I hurried up with a hundred and fifty sailors. The
first houses on each side of the street of Pera were in flames, but a
spot was pointed out to me, twelve or fifteen houses off, where, the
street narrowing between a stone mosque and some gardens, one might
hope to clear a space to stop the fire, by pulling down the five or six
intervening houses. I had no hesitation in giving the order for this,
my men set eagerly to work, and all the active portion of the Frank
population of Pera were seconding our efforts, when one of the generals
of the garrison, Selim Pasha, came up with his men, and fell into a
fury at the sight of what we were doing. I forthwith seized him by the
hand and dragged him, the dragoman of the Embassy, M. Lauxerrois,
following us, to the top of the minaret of the mosque. Here I said to
the dragoman, "Do show this fool of a pasha that the clearing we are
making is our only chance of saving Pera;" and as M. Lauxerrois began
to translate this into Turkish, "Don't trouble," said Selim Pasha, in
very good French, "I understand." I begged his pardon for the epithet,
but he had passed suddenly already from rage to enthusiasm. He tore
down stairs four steps at a time, and I shortly saw him without his
coat, in trousers and list braces, helping us to pull down the houses,
and setting an example of the utmost activity to his own men.

Down came the houses, one after the other. Our sailors behaved
splendidly. They climbed up on to the roofs and fastened ropes, to
which we harnessed the whole of the population, while the frameworks
were being sawn through below till the whole thing came down with a
crash. Indeed I saw one house come down with five or six sailors
perched on its roof. I rushed forward in horror, thinking they must all
be maimed or killed. Not a bit of it! Only a few hands and feet torn by
nails! Truly God watches over the brave! The fall of one Turkish house
caused a pretty scene! The proprietor was determined to prevent it. He
struck and swore at us,--pulling out his beard. The anticipation of the
destruction of his property drove him wild. Finding nobody paid any
attention to him, he called his women folk to his assistance. They
hastened up like furies, at first. Then, changing their tactics, they
cast themselves on my officers, clasping them in their arms, covering
them with kisses and caresses, and trying "the power of their charms on
them in every imaginable way. It was a curious sight truly to watch by
the light of the flames, and amidst such a cacophony of races, a
handful of sailors stopping the passers-by, Turks as well as the rest,
setting them to work, snatching the fire-pumps from the firemen,
carrying soldiers and generals too along with them, and in fact ruling
the roast in the very middle of Constantinople.

At last, thanks to the fire-pump and thanks to our own selves, the fire
stopped just where we had fought it. I went off then towards the
cemetery, where it was still burning, and where the sight was most
singular. An immense crowd of people, the whole population of the
burnt-out quarters of the town, in every imaginable costume, and silent
like true fatalists, herded on the hill and the plateau, together with
whatever had been saved out of the disaster. Under the red light of the
conflagration, the flames of which shot up in great jets into the
skies, the huge bivouac made a splendid picture, reminding one of the
works of the English painter Martyn, the Last Judgment, Belshezzar's
Feast, and so forth. Stamboul, with her forest of minarets and her
thousands of lights, stood out on the horizon against a lovely starry
sky, and in the foreground the Seraskier sat in a big armchair,
surrounded by an immense staff, seeming very philosophically resigned
to the catastrophe over which he appeared to be presiding. In one hand
he held his pipe, and in the other a slice of melon. We were already
well acquainted, and when he saw me coming up, all blackened with smoke
and ashes, he roared with laughter. But he gave me a slice of his
melon, and very grateful it was to my parched throat.

The fire was under control--that is to say, there was only one block of
houses left burning, and this had no communication with either Galata
or Pera. But the disaster was a great one. Over fifteen hundred houses
had been burnt. The exact number was never known. First because nobody
counted them--that would have been quite contrary to oriental
indifference and fatalism--and then because it would have been
excessively difficult to make them out, in the confused ash heap which
had taken their place. The number of families reduced to destitution
must have been very considerable, but individual charity is very
liberal amongst the Mussulmans, as indeed amongst all people possessed
of religious faith. I got home, at one o'clock in the morning, worn
out. Shortly afterwards the wind rose. If it had begun to blow a little
earlier, nothing would have remained of Pera, of the Frankish town, nor
of the Embassies.

A very few days had gone by when I was bidden to quite a different sort
of entertainment. After the disease of adopting the Gentile's trousers
and frock-coat, yet another disease seized upon Turkey--that of having
a constitution in imitation of the constitutions in vogue amongst the
Giaours, and the Sultan had the kindness to ask me to see one
proclaimed. Concerning the constitution itself, which bore the
altogether Turkish name of "Hatti Schereef de Gulhane," I will say
nothing. First of all because I never read it, and secondly because I
have been told it was "liberal," that is to say, fitted, like M.
Prudhomme's sword, to organize government, and if necessary to destroy
it, this last more frequently--and that is quite enough for me. But the
proclamation ceremony was likely to be curious. So on the appointed day
I started forth in full uniform, to be present at it. It was to take
place within the Seraglio. The first incident in the day was that my
boat met the Russian Minister's caique at the landing-stage, and as
neither of our coxswains would yield to the other there was an awful
bump, which damaged the dignity of our attitudes by knocking us down
like card houses. Then we had to ride rather frisky horses in Turkish
saddles, and this, what with our cocked hats, dangling swords, and
unstrapped trousers, was yet another trial to the dignity of some of my
sailor comrades. Nevertheless, we got without hindrance to a kiosk, the
upper story of which was to be occupied by the Sultan and his harem,
and the lower by the diplomatic corps. A special window had been
reserved for me. Bands began to play, loud shouts were heard. The
Sultan was coming, on horseback, preceded by a crowd of officers and
pashas, in full dress. Between him and them, dressed in a sort of blue
blouse with epaulettes, hobbled a little lame man with a big red head,
a white beard, and a spiteful-looking face. It was Kosrew Pasha, the
Grand Vizier, he who had caused so many heads to fall, the strangler of
the Sheik el Islam. He bowed low several times as he passed me. After
him came the Sultan's pages, handsome young fellows, carrying halberts
and wearing gilt shakos with immense plumes of peacocks' feathers,
aigrettes, or birds of Paradise. In the centre of them was the Sultan
himself, almost hidden by their plumes. He kept his head thrown back
and wore a black cloak trimmed with diamonds and a fez with an aigrette
adorned with the same stones. He dismounted. The Grand Vizier and the
new Sheik el Islam held up the corners of his cloak, while a hideous
negro, with hanging lips and haunches like a woman, covered with
embroideries, advanced to receive him. This was Kislar Aga, chief
eunuch and governor of the harem.

And now everybody has come, "Let the sport begin." From my window I
look out on a broad space, surrounded by beautiful umbrella pines and
sloping gently down to the sea. Beyond is the Asiatic shore of the
Bosphorus and the pretty village of Kadi-Keni. This space is full of
troops, twelve splendid battalions of the Imperial Guard, Lancers and
Artillery. These form a circle, in the centre of which rises a pulpit
covered with some yellow stuff, and around it the pashas and the whole
body of Ulemas and Mollahs, wearing the ancient costume--coloured
kaftans, and big white or green turbans crossed with broad gold
bands--shortly collect. The chief dervishes and the heads of all the
religious sects are there also. All this clergy stands there
motionless, impassive, with lowered eyes, not over pleased, I fancy, at
bottom. Then the crowd makes a rush, which infuriates the Grand Vizier.
He makes towards it, lifting his little leg very high and waving his
handkerchief. At the very sight of him everybody flees, and retires
humbly within bounds. Then the manuscript of the Hatti-Schereef is
brought to him. He carries it respectfully to his lips and forehead,
and hands it over to Reschid Pasha, who ascends the pulpit and reads it
out. That over and finished midst the deepest silence, an Imaum takes
Reschid Pasha's place in the pulpit. He stretches out his arms. All
present do the same, the soldiers stretching out but one on account of
their weapons, and he intones the prayer for the Sultan, which every
one repeats in chorus. After which every man passes his hand across his
eyes and beard and the troops shout "Allah" three times, with
unequalled fervour and passion. Hundreds of cannon are fired in all
directions, and the beautiful sight, lighted up by the most brilliant
of sunshine, has come to an end. The Sultan has departed. The Sultana
Valide sends me a posse of officials, bearing cakes and sweetmeats. I
take leave of Kosrew Pasha and depart also, thinking sadly that if this
Turkish people, so brave on the field of battle and apparently still so
devoted to its sovereign, and so firm in its religious faith, is truly,
in spite of all, a rapidly decaying nation, the miserable rag of paper
read out this day will certainly not save it.

The Sultan gave me an uninteresting audience in the pretty Top-Kapou
Palace--now burnt down, I believe--which stood on the extreme end of
the Seraglio point. I had visited the palace, which was then
unoccupied, with a very witty Pasha who spoke French admirably
well--and whom I had known in Paris--Namick Pasha, commander of the
Imperial Guard. We had gone over all the rooms in the harem, and this
visit, with the explanations and commentaries given me by such a guide,
had been most interesting. One room was a perfect gem, and I cannot
resist the pleasure of describing it. It was very large, circular, the
floor covered with very fine matting. All round it was a little raised
platform, covered with divans. The walls were entirely formed of great
mirrors, in splendid rococo frames of carved wood, gilt. It was
evidently the room in which the harem festivals were held. Between the
mirrors were eight little doors, every one leading to a small apartment
for one woman, fitted with mirrors and divans and each hung with a
different stuff. To complete the whole thing, there was a passage
leading to a bath-house, consisting of several very pretty marble
bath-rooms. The master of all this must have had a good time! All sorts
of details were given me while I was there. The Sultan had no
legitimate wives except those who bear children--so the competition may
be imagined. Mahmoud had had thirty-five children, but only five were
left, two sons and three daughters. The rest had died in infancy. The
actual Sultan, Abdul-Medjid, who was very young at the time of my
visit, had only one wife with child, but his mother, the Sultana
Valide, had just presented him with six young ladies, said to be
charming, as an encouragement. Besides this, every year, at the Feast
of Bairam, the Sheik el Islam gives the Sultan a beautiful slave to
whom he is compelled by the Law and the Prophet to give proofs of his
affection, that very day, on pain of incurring the wrath of Allah. Only
nobody knows whether Allah, up in his celestial home, has reason to be
pleased or not.

Having still a few spare days before I rejoined the squadron, I took
advantage of an Austrian steamer to cross the Black Sea as far as
Trebizond, whence I gazed admiringly on the splendid chain of the snowy
Caucasian peaks. I should much have liked to get as far as Erzeroum, in
the heart of Asia Minor. But as time failed me I contented myself with
travelling at full speed for one day, along the road leading thither,
with the Tartar or postman who carried the mails, so as to obtain some
idea of the country. When I say road I speak figuratively. It was not
even a path. It was a mere track across the woods and rocks and ravines
of that mountainous region, but along that track the Tartar galloped
imperturbably, never stopping however terrible the ground might be.
When the post-carrying experience was over, my comrades and I were more
done up than we had ever been in our lives. The least weary of the
party was the son of our consul at Trebizond, Maxime Outrey, a charming
lad, brought up and dressed a l'orientale, whom we had taken with us as
our dragoman, and who vied with the Tartar in speed and boldness the
whole day long like one possessed. On the way back from Trebizond our
steamer was crammed with passengers coming from every corner of Asia,
the strangest medley of Circassians, Persians, and cat merchants, and
one pasha. I bought a splendid Angora during the passage, and the pasha
bought himself a wife. The whole of the negotiations for the latter
acquisition, the discussions, the examination and verification of the
merchandize, took place in our cabin, and very amusing it was. The
young lady belonged to a Tcherkess family which had eluded the Russian
cruisers, and come alongside of us at Trebizond in big boats with
triangular sails, spotted like a tiger's hide. The head of the family,
a tall old man, was going to Mecca, to seek a cure there for the
horrible agony caused by a Russian bullet which was still in his head.
His sons, handsome fellows in splendid costumes, with fine features and
shoulders broad out of all proportion to waists that were like girls',
were going with him. There were a dozen women besides, and do you know,
my reader, what that pack of women was? Letters of credit, bank notes,
by means of which the old man with his wound expected to pay the
expenses of his journey! Having no cash, he had brought the twelve
best-looking girls in his family with him. He had just disposed of one
on board, and he reckoned on doing the same with the rest all along the
road. We soon made the acquaintance of the party. The girls were
huddled together on deck in a sort of cage or trelliswork, where they
remained, drenched by the sea, four days and three nights, without
their chatter and their outbursts of merriment ever ceasing for a
single instant. They all dreamt of becoming the wives of sultans or
pashas and of living in palaces. As the old man fed them with nothing
but millet, to fatten them, we used to bring them our dessert after
each meal, and so we were soon good friends. Thanks to some trifling
service I rendered the old man, he consented to bringing the prettiest
girl into my cabin, and allowing her to unveil, so that I might do her
picture. I thought the model and her costume both equally lovely, but
the sitting was a very short one. Whether it was shyness or
sea-sickness I know not. But she complained of the heat, began to cry,
and I had to send her away.

I merely passed through Constantinople on my way back. It was the
middle of Ramadan, all the mosques lighted up at night, and the women
promenading in the square of the Seraskier in the daytime--a regular
persil. I went there one day with Paul Daru, Lavalette and Cyrus
Gerard, all members of the embassy M. de Sercey was taking to Persia.
They came from Paris and told me the news from there. In my turn I told
them all about the battle of Nezib, a very interesting description of
which I had had the good luck to hear from two young Prussian officers,
eye-witnesses of it, one of whom became the celebrated Marshal von
Moltke; and also all I learnt about the Eastern question on my visits
to the Embassies, to Therapia and Buyukdere. There I had met all the
chief members of the diplomatic corps, which consisted during my stay
of two French ambassadors, succeeding each other, both of them
instability personified--one was Admiral Roussin, a distinguished
sailor, the other M. de Pontois, a professional diplomat--both of them
very kind, but neither, as a result of their instability, having any
real influence. Beside them two men of tenacity and steadfastness
admirably personified two great powers. Lord Ponsonby, a tall, blunt,
haughty, unsociable old man, represented British perseverance and Lord
Palmerston's prejudices, while M. de Boutenieff, a charming, kindly,
and witty man, liked by everybody and making game somewhat of all,
stood for the great destinies of the Russian people, and the mighty
will of the Emperor Nicholas. An armed Russian intervention in the
Bosphorus was no longer in question, but it was unforeseen as yet that
Russia and England would agree to ruin the work of Mehemet Ali, the
last strength in reality of the Mussulman world, and that the whole of
Europe would join these two powers in their willing alliance for the
isolation and humiliation of France, revolutionary France! No more
allies for us, since we have gone into that mill! We sacrificed 200,000
men in the Crimea. What did we get by it? The garter for Napoleon III.
One word or deed of sympathy for all our reverses? Not the shadow of
one! Revolutionary France has been asked for help. But none has ever
been given her. Would it be rendered her now? God grant it!

CHAPTER VII

1840-1841

I left Constantinople with a farewell glance, full of pleasant
memories, over its forest of minarets, over the Bosphorus and the
smiling Princes Islands, and at the snowy peak too of Mount Olympus,
which, with my taste for mountaineering, I had climbed but a short time
previously. An interesting ascent it had been, first of all through
that Eastern Switzerland around the pretty town of Broussa, and then
over the snow and rocky debris to the summit, whence a matchless
panorama is to be seen. The squadrons, one French and one English,
forming a strong force of ships, were at that time on guard at the
mouth of the Dardanelles. I went back to my duty in ours, which was
still as active and incessantly drilled as ever. The English squadron,
commanded by Sir Robert Stopford, a handsome white-haired old man, was
less restless. But the fleets dispersed before long. Ours sailed for
Smyrna, whence the Admiral sent the Belle-Poule under my command, and
the Triton, Captain Hamelin, back to France. We sailed in company, and
after a somewhat lengthy winter passage, we got to Toulon only to find
ourselves put into thirty-five days of quarantine. Five and thirty days
of prison and solitude and uselessness imposed on a crew without a
single sick man, which was daily inspected by its officers as to
cleanliness, whose health was looked after by three doctors, and which
had just gone through the best and safest of purifying operations--a
long sea voyage. Five and thirty days during which 400 men ate and
drank and lived at the expense of the National Budget without doing the
smallest work for the country--the whole thing inflicted by the
Sanitary Board--a purely local and irresponsible body, with its eternal
round of red tape. A good thing it is indeed that such a monstrous and
intolerable abuse should have been abolished! The only reason it lasted
so long is, that it brought in a revenue to the members of the board.
To begin with, they filled the inn they kept under the title of
"Lazaretto" by force, and then they sold the disinfectants.
"Gentlemen," the sanitary officer would say, with his provencal
accent--"Nous allons faire le parfum." The crew were shut up below, the
officer lighted a sort of pastille which made a great smoke, everybody
pretended to sneeze at once ... and we were disinfected! The farce was
over! There was a great dinner too, which the board gave itself at
Saint Roch, at the expense of the persons in quarantine, which put the
finishing touch to the scandal. Wherefore, during my own detention, I
always had the band on deck as soon as the boat belonging to the board
appeared in the port, and greeted it with the most horrible and
discordant of music. Further, I asked guilelessly for leave to carry on
my ship's firing drill in the Lazaretto Bay, and I took care to open
fire so close to the Lazaretto itself that I heard all the glass in the
windows fall out with a crash. As I expected, I was forbidden to do it
again, the board being furious, and having lodged a complaint, stating
that I used bad cartridges, but I had a delicious moment of vengeance
all the same.

The quarantine came to an end at last, I was given leave, and once
more, with joy, beheld my family, and Paris too. I had spent the
greater part of my existence for the past four years at sea, and I
confess I thirsted somewhat for Paris, dear unrivalled Paris! I got
there in the heart of the winter of 1839, and left it in the first days
of June of the same year. What recollections have I of those four
months of repose? In vain I tax my memory, I can find nothing, or
hardly anything at all. As far as exterior events go, none but the most
infinitesimally small--the eternal wearying struggle between ministers
in esse and in posse, which left the bulk of the public exceedingly
indifferent. If the situation from the external point of view had grown
more serious, at all events it did not inspire anxiety. The strength of
the monarchical principle still made itself felt, in spite of the hitch
in 1830. People reckoned on the King, on his wisdom and farsighted
patriotism, to ward off the dangers, present and future, with which the
ambition of the permanent and persevering governments around us
threaten us, but of which our short-sighted democracy takes so little
account. The King was indeed shortly to justify this confidence by
saving France from a war with a European coalition, about the Eastern
question--a war into which we were being led by the imprudence of M.
Thiers and the bragging of our press and which could have ended in
nothing but disaster.

The governmental machine worked meanwhile, as a whole, with tolerable
smoothness. The House of Peers, the members of which were permanent,
and therefore strangers to electoral compromise, discussed with weight
and authority laws which were really progressive, respecting as they
did the interests and liberties of all concerned; while the Chamber of
Deputies, consisting of unpaid members, voted with much more care for
the public weal than is possible in an assembly of men enslaved by
their election committees, and perpetually haunted by the nightmare of
re-election. An independent magistracy, according to President
Seguier's fine expression, gave sentences, not services, "rendait des
arrets, et non pas des services" while the administration, which was
almost as permanent as the magistracy, had time to do good work and did
it. In short, except for the criminal classes, and those incorrigible
revolutionists who ask perpetually for the impossible, everybody felt
that his security, his liberty, and his faith, were well protected,
and, as I heard said on all sides when I came back from my voyages,
people felt they were well governed. It is true that if I opened the
newspapers I generally read to the contrary in them--but if there were
some few serious organs of public opinion among these journals, edited
by courageous and talented men, who did their best to serve their
country by their writings, whatever their opinions might be, how many
more had editors who were mere slander-mongers, and columns all the
more eagerly read, the more calumnious they were, and the more they
pandered to every envious and subversive passion. Such men were the
spokesmen of that increasingly numerous class of speculators, who
relinquish any useful career to seek fortune in the chances of
politics. According to them, oppression and corruption had grown
intolerable, and would never cease until power passed into their own
immaculate hands. They alone possessed the secret for turning France
into a terrestrial Paradise, by applying in all SINCERITY the great and
high-sounding principles, liberty, equality and fraternity. This
SINCERITY of application, which has been so frequently announced,
dallies somewhat in its coming, especially as regards equality, which
to so many people merely means, "That which I have not nobody else
shall have." The word equality is seductive truly, and in every
self-respecting community equality before the law must be utterly
absolute for all men. But so long as science discovers no means for
making all men equally intelligent and all women equally beautiful, I
shall continue to look upon universal and blind equality as the most
absurd and the most dangerous of chimeras. These reflections did not
occur to me at the period I speak of. I was far too careless in the
year 1840 to bother my head about the conundrums set by our
office-seekers, "place-hunters" as the Americans call them. While they
were amusing themselves with the fancies, envious, irreligious,
unhealthy, and above all self-interested, which they posed as deducing
from the principles of 1789, a far more terrible revolution than the
French one--for it was to strike the poor as well as the rich--was
shortly to burst upon us; the revolution brought about by the use of
steam and electricity and rapidity of communication. Few people in
those days foresaw the complete subversion of all the conditions of
labour and food supply and life itself, which was to overtake all the
peoples gathered together in old-established communities on worn-out
soil, a subversion which is only in its beginning as yet, and the
remedy for which we cannot discover.

One of the first results of the use of steam was to make it essential
for all nations having war fleets to transform their arsenals and their
naval stores. It was absolutely necessary to be able to oppose an
enemy, whose means of attack could overcome wind and tide, with
defensive means of equal power. That was as clear as A B C. This
transformation interested me keenly--for the future of the arm of the
service to which I had fervently devoted my whole life, and which I
desired to see become once more a redoubtable weapon of our country's
power, was bound up with it. But, to carry it through, we had to war
with routine, with the obstinacy bred of old habit, and with the narrow
ideas which were taught in the naval schools. It was a continuous daily
struggle in which I bore an assiduous part.

Apart from this naval question, my time was spent between my home life,
my worship for the fine arts, and the theatre, and also in
boar-hunting, of which I grew passionately fond; and what makes this
curious is that before I tried it I scorned the idea to such an extent
that my brothers tied me up and took me by force the first time. Every
incident of the hunt, the attack, the pursuit, all the unforeseen
occurrences of the chase, leading you nobody knows whither, so that you
even lose yourself in the dark sometimes in strange places, has still
all the charm of struggle and action to me. And what a pleasant party
of sportsmen we used to be, during our visits to Compiegne, to
Chantilly, and above all to Fontainebleau! My brothers and I, the two
Greffuhles, Caumont, Morny, Valewski, Edgard Ney, La Rochette, Casimir
Perier, d'Albufera, Wagram, the de l'Aigles; foreigners too, Bedmar,
d'Ossuna--and officers--and some ladies,--amongst these the beautiful
Duchess of Somerset, who always hunted in a mask, and was invariably
escorted by the charming Prince Labanoff. There were painters too
amongst the most assiduous sportsmen--Jadin and Decamps. Decamps, of
whom I was a fanatical admirer, was just in his best period--so too
were Delacroix and M. Ingres; and all that pleiad of great artists,
young then and in the full flush of their powers--Leopold Robert,
Horace Vernet, Delaroche, my own master Ary Scheffer, Flandrin, and the
landscape painters Marilhat and Corot--this last, in his first manner,
dry and rectilinear, like that of Poussin. Nobody nowadays has any idea
of the eager discussions aroused by the opening of the Salon and the
superior merit of such a picture or statue. Nobody was indifferent:
everybody was either for or against; each man either attacked the
artist or lauded him to the skies. Works of art bring more money now,
according as they are produced by this man or that, but they are less
discussed. Which is the best inspiration for an artist, money or
passion?

The theatres too, the Vaudeville, Varietes, Francais, the Opera, were
delightful. At the Vaudeville, which had migrated after the fire in the
Rue de Chartres to the Boulevard Bonne Nouvelle, Arnal, the inimitable,
quaintest and cleverest of comic actors, was playing. At the Varietes
they were acting the Saltimbanques, a play every line of which has
passed into proverbs, which all my generation have been repeating for
the last forty years. A woman of genius, Mademoiselle Rachel, had
brought back its long forgotten glory to the Theatre Francais. For my
part I never saw anything so absolutely perfect on the stage. With
hardly any gesture, simply by the play of her countenance, her
expressive glance, and the intonation of her voice, she expressed all
the passions with an intensity that affected all her audience. She had
a genius for dress and drapery. In her peplum she might have been taken
for an antique statue, and she knew how to endue herself with the most
incomparable womanly charm in all her parts, even the most savage ones.
If she had committed murder you would have loved the murderess, and,
strangely enough, this extraordinary woman was never witty except with
her pen.

As for the Opera, the production of the great composers who had made
its glory some years before had ceased. Of that trio of wonderful
artists, Nourrit, Levasseur, and Mdlle. Falcon, only one, Levasseur,
remained. The art of music was taking a rest. To make amends for this,
the opera shone in ballet, fairy-like performances in which pantomime
and trap-doors played as important a part as the actual dancing.
Nothing could have been more enchanting than the Diable Boiteux with
its many and various tableaux and its dresses, and Fanny Elsler dancing
the "cachucha," or the Sylphide or the Revolte du Serail with Taglioni.
I saw my brother Nemours in great danger during a performance of this
last-named ballet. At a certain point the dancers, representing the
revoltees, armed themselves with bows and shot a cloud of arrows into
the wings. Now in the heat of action one of these arrows, launched with
extraordinary vigour but uncertain aim by a charming young lady, one of
the principal dancers, Mcllle. Duvernay, stuck in the column which
separated the Royal Box in the old Le Pelletier house from that of the
Marquis du Hallay, only a few inches from my brother's head. There was
an exclamation from all parts of the house, great confusion on the
stage and many comments made. But "all's well that ends well." That
happy time of youth and carelessness and hunting and theatre-going was
not to last long. Two of my brothers started for Africa--Chartres (as
we always called our eldest brother the Due d'Orleans) was to take over
the command of a division in the column which, under the orders of
Marshal Vallee, was to check the rising prestige of Abd el Kader for
ever at the Mouzaia Pass. My younger brother Aumale, was to have the
opportunity during this expedition of breaking his first lance right
brilliantly. I saw them depart with envy, and to add to my annoyance I
shortly fell ill of a violent attack of measles. One day, as I lay in
high fever, I saw my father appear followed by M. de Remusat, then
Minister of the Interior. This unusual visit filled me with
astonishment, and my surprise increased when my father said,
"Joinville, you are to go out to St. Helena and bring back Napoleon's
coffin." If I had not been in bed already I should have fallen down
flat, and at the first blush I felt nowise flattered when I compared
the warlike campaign my brothers were on with the undertaker's job I
was being sent to perform in the other hemisphere. But I served my
country and I had no right to discuss my orders. And there were two
sides to the question, besides. Above Napoleon, the enemy of my house,
the murderer of the Duc d'Enghien, who at his fall had left that
dangerous game of chance wherein the ignorant herd is so often the dupe
of the political croupier--universal suffrage--as his legacy to ruined
and dismembered France,--there was the matchless warrior whose genius,
even in defeat, had shed immortal glory on our arms. To fetch his ashes
from a foreign land was in a manner to wave the flag of vanquished
France aloft once more--that at least was what we hoped for--and this
view of the case reconciled me to my mission. As soon as I was on my
legs again I started for Toulon, provided with full orders and
instructions, both royal and ministerial, and re-took command of the
Belle-Poule, a command I was to hold in many seas, during three
consecutive years. I felt some regret at leaving Paris, but the delight
at being back amongst the faithful and worthy fellows who made up my
crew, my second family, soon made me forget what I had left behind me.
Presently a certain number of passengers came on board. They formed
what was called the St Helena Mission. Almost all of them had been
comrades of Napoleon in his greatness and in his misfortunes. There
were Generals Bertrand and Gourgaud, M. de las Cazes, &c., &c. During
the long passages of the voyage, the conversation of these gentlemen,
who had been present at so many events and followed the Emperor through
so many adventures, was most deeply interesting. Every day there was a
running fire of anecdote and traits of character, much closer to the
truth doubtless than many a leisurely prepared history. I have often
regretted we had no shorthand writer with us.

During the first days of our voyage we touched at Cadiz to get our last
despatches before starting across the ocean. I was as glad as ever to
see the white walls of Cadiz again, and I made a pilgrimage to the
Cortadura, to the Trocadero (this in memory of the brilliant exploits
of the Royal Guard in 1823), and also to the battle-field of Chiclana,
which witnessed a terrible struggle between ourselves and the English
in February 1811, some of the actors in which I had known. Coming back
from Chiclana after a somewhat cheery luncheon, Arthur Bertrand, the
general's son, well known at that time in the gay world of Paris, gave
us a specimen of the maddest equestrian prowess. He galloped at full
speed across the Alameda at Chiclana, which was paved with slippery
flags, standing upright on his English saddle. There is a providence
that watches over madmen!

A characteristic incident occurred on leaving Cadiz. In case of
delicate negotiations with the English authorities at St. Helena, and
also in order to draw up the protocol for the surrender of the body, a
young diplomat, the Comte Philippe de Rohan Chabot,[Footnote: This
gentleman died in London as French Ambassador, under the title of Comte
de Jarna] had been associated with me.

We had hardly got out of the port of Cadiz, and cut our last
communications with France, when I saw him approach me, looking very
much embarrassed. He offered me a paper to read, saying it was only on
account of his orders he had not communicated it to me before. I cast
my eye over the signature at the foot of the paper and saw the name of
M. Thiers, President of the Council. By these secret instructions,
which were not to be imparted to me till we got to sea, M. Thiers
informed M. de Chabot that he, Chabot, was his direct agent and that he
invested him with superior authority to mine for as long as the mission
should last. Such was the strange missive, aimed not only at the
captain in command of the ship, but also, with an evident intention to
wound, at the King's son--an application in a very small way of that
maxim so dear to M. Thiers, "the King reigns but he does not govern."
Stranger still was the care he took to keep it secret until, being cut
off from France, I was no longer in a position to make any observation
on the contradiction between these fresh instructions and the precise
orders I had received previously. Friends from childhood as we were,
Philippe and I, no idea of conflict between us was admissible. I made
no complaint to any one and treated M. Thiers' behaviour to me with
contempt, but from that day the sympathetic and almost affectionate
relations I had previously lived in with that statesman came to an
end--they were replaced by a sense of deep distrust and a scanty esteem
for his character.

The Belle-Poule put in at Teneriffe to take in provisions and water,
and I took advantage of this stoppage to finish the ascent of the
famous Peak which I had had to break off in 1837. The last cone, all of
crumbly pumice stone, and at a very acute angle, is tolerably tiring.
On the summit is a small plateau, the soft soil of which is covered
with flowers of sulphur and creviced with smoke holes from which
scalding steam keeps escaping. Having got up in two days, we descended
rapidly to the smiling little town of Orotava, built amidst the most
lovely vegetation in a sort of ravine opening out on the sea. The
female population of Orotava has a well-deserved reputation for beauty,
and we were very kindly met by an invitation to make sure of the fact
by being present at an afternoon dance, a sort of "garden party" got up
in our honour--a great temptation truly, but a great perplexity as
well! People coming back off a mountain climb, including two waterless
bivouacs and a pull through the smoke and ashes of a volcano, are not
in ball trim, either as to costume or to cleanliness. After a hasty
council of war, it was decided that we should draw lots for the names
of three of our party, who were to wash themselves, and to whom each of
the non-chosen should furnish the least damaged articles of his own
clothing, so as to put them in proper condition to go to the ball and
keep up the honour of our flag before the belles of Orotava. We retired
into a wood to proceed to draw lots and embellish the elect Fate did
not favour me. I did not go to the ball, but my boots did, and our
comrades came back full of admiration of all they had seen.

From Teneriffe our passage was a slow one. We had calms, storms, even
gales, and then a fresh delay in port at Bahia in Brazil. I had been
advised on leaving Paris to arrange the progress of the mission so as
to make the return of the ashes of the Emperor to Europe coincide with
the opening of the Chambers in the end of December. Indeed I believe
the chief importance of the return of the ashes of Napoleon, in M.
Thiers' mind, lay in this coincidence. It was the tom-tom by beating
which he hoped to drown all those reports and inklings of ministerial
changes which always sprout at such moments in the parliamentary soil.
But it was somewhat difficult to time our arrival to a given moment,
with a sailing ship, and after such a long voyage. Originally I was to
have called at the Cape before going to St. Helena. I thought it better
to replace our stoppage at the Cape by one at Bahia, so as to shorten
the journey and save time. Very uninteresting our stay at Bahia was,
save for the following picturesque incident.

I had chartered a small steamer on which I used to go on sporting
expeditions with some of the officers. They were somewhat in the nature
of voyages of discovery up the rivers which fall into Bahia Bay. During
one of these excursions we had got some considerable distance up the
Cachoeira without seeing a sign of any inhabitants, and leaving our
boat at anchor, we had landed and spent our day in slaying toucans,
parrokeets of all colours, and all the strange birds and beasts
peopling the virgin forest, when at sunset we fell upon a cleared path,
which led us to a wide glade and then to a village, the existence of
which had been hitherto quite unsuspected by us. We entered it and
found it deserted, the doors of all the houses shut. We went towards a
very large square in the middle of the "Pueblo"--it was deserted too.
We entered a fine church, the door of which stood open--not a soul
within it, though the smell of the incense at some recently performed
religious ceremony still hung in the air. In the middle of the square
stood a kiosk, evidently intended for concerts; the instruments of an
orchestra were still there, lying on the chairs before the desks, as if
the music had only been broken off a few minutes previously. This
suddenly deserted village rather puzzled us. But in the hope of
bringing the population back to life, and with a certain spice too of
mischief, we laid down our guns, and seizing on the big drum, and the
abandoned trombones and clarionets, we raised a most alarming noise. It
was mere waste of time, nobody came. The evening was falling, it was
time to get back on board our steamer, and we quietly retook our way
towards her. Night--a moonlight night it was--had completely closed in,
when we got to the mangrove creek, where we had left the small boat
which was to bring us back on board. We were crowding into the little
craft, half aground on the mud, when a great clamour rose from the
forest, and we saw weapons glint through the foliage on all sides. In
the twinkling of an eye, before we had time to get over our surprise, a
crowd of people armed with guns, swords, and pikes, rushed up at top
speed, yelling loudly, and surrounded us, some remaining on shore and
others throwing themselves into the water. We were instantly carried
off, disarmed, separated, soundly thrashed, and dragged into the
forest. Anybody who has looked at the picture of the savages attacking
Captain Cook, in the history of his voyage, will have an exact idea of
the scene. It was not otherwise than picturesque in the moonlight, and
under that tropical vegetation; and it really was an attack by savages
too, most of them negroes, and the rest mulattoes. Very luckily for us,
our surprise and our unloaded guns, and the way we were crowded into
the boat, prevented our making any resistance, otherwise we should
certainly have been massacred, surrounded as we were by 200 armed men.
Each of us had his own little experience in the scuffle. I, for my
part, jumped into the water, knocking up the pikes of two negroes, who
looked as if they were going to spit me, with my gun, and hurriedly
caught a man--with a civilian's hat on his head, a sash over his
shoulder, and a big sword in his hand, who seemed to me to be the
leader of the band--round the waist. I gave him to understand, in a few
words, in bad Portuguese, that I commmanded the French warships
anchored at Bahia, and that if harm came to any of us, he and his
fellows would live to repent it. But before I could finish my speech
the angry crowd fell on me, carried me off, and dragged me to a mound,
against which, as I seemed to understand, they meant to back me and
shoot me. Indeed five or six negroes stationed in front of me hastily
loaded their guns. The situation was far from pleasant, for those who
know the negro race know what they are capable of when swayed by the
paroxysms of excitement into which they work themselves, whether from
drunkenness, or rage, or fear. Fouchard, whom two or three men were
holding a few steps off from me, seeing what was happening, threw off
his captors by a superhuman effort and sprang to my side. We clung fast
to each other, and this caused a fresh struggle and a respite of a
minute's duration, during which the man in the sash, who had quickly
understood this was becoming a bad business for himself, charged at the
head of the most reasonable of his mulattoes. We were captured and
recaptured several times, but victory at last rested with the man in
the scarf, and an explanation became possible. It appears there had
been an election, with considerable disturbances--blessed be elections
in all places and countries!--in the village, on the preceding day. The
inhabitants, in their over-excitement, had been struck first with
surprise, and afterwards with terror on hearing us firing at the
parrokeets. Their terror reached its height when seven or eight
white-skinned men, oddly armed and accoutred, were seen to enter the
village. The whole population fled into the woods. Then noting from
afar how small our number was, and more especially observing our
retreat, valour took the place of fright, and arming itself, it rushed
to the enemy's pursuit! We were set at liberty of course, and apologies
were duly made; but that did not mend the blows received, especially by
one of the lieutenants of the Belle-Poule, Penhoat, who had been half
murdered. We boarded our steamer, and found the English engineer in
charge of her completely drunk. When we told him our story he rushed
below to his engine-room, and fetched out a huge pistol that must have
dated from Cromwell's time; and we had all the trouble in the world to
prevent him from going on shore alone to take signal vengeance on
"those damned niggers."

Leaving Bahia, we had to go a long way down the Southern Atlantic
before we got a favourable wind. We reached St. Helena at last--a great
black rock, a jagged volcanic island resembling Martinique, minus its
splendid vegetation--a scrap of Scotland set in mid-ocean, and swept
incessantly by the Trade wind, which blows with wearisome continuance
and gathers a thick and permanent cloud-clap above the isle. It looked
gloomy from the sea, and the impression on arrival there was gloomy
too. James Town, the capital, is simply a wretched village, stretching
along a narrow valley, shut in by dreary-looking rocks crowned by
forts, to which you climb by staircases counting six hundred steps. The
country around Plantation House, the Governor's residence, the valley
of the Tomb, the Tomb itself with the legendary willows, and Longwood,
the prison house, all are equally gloomy, and equally calculated to
kill the great genius banished thither, by inches.

The business which had brought me was quickly settled between myself
and the Governor, General Middlemore. The orders of the British
Government were clear and precise, and the local authorities showed
great goodwill in carrying them out. They undertook the exclusive care
of the exhumation and transport of the remains over British territory,
and it was all done with the utmost propriety. The only request I made
and obtained was, that the coffin should be opened before it was handed
over to us, so as to be sure that we were taking neither a hotbed of
infection nor an imaginary corpse on board. The Governor himself being
ill I saw but little of him. He commissioned the officer in command of
the troops, Colonel Trelawny, of the Royal Artillery, to represent him.
He was a pleasant man, but decidedly eccentric. His great mania was the
study of genealogy, and he never failed to explain when we met that he
was my cousin, and that we were both related to the late Sultan Mahmoud
on the female side!

When all was ready the exhumation took place, and very imposing it was.
Everybody felt impressed when the coffin was seen coming slowly down
the mountain side, to the firing of cannon, escorted by British
infantry with arms reversed, the band playing, to the dull rolling
accompaniment of the drums, that splendid funeral march which English
people call The Dead March in Saul, but which is really no other than
the ancient Catholic chant of Adeste Fideles. General Middlemore,
dropping with fatigue, formally handed over the body to me; and the
coffin was lowered into the long-boat of the Belle-Poule, which then
started for the ship. The scene at that moment was very fine. It was a
striking moment A magnificent sunset had been succeeded by a twilight
of the deepest calm. The British authorities and the troops stood
motionless on the beach, while our ship's guns fired a royal salute. I
stood in the stern of my long-boat, over which floated a magnificent
Tricolour flag worked by the ladies of St Helena. Beside me were the
generals and superior officers, M. de Chabot and M de las Gazes. The
pick of my topmen, all in white, with crape on their arms, and
bareheaded like ourselves, rowed the boat in silence, and with the most
admirable precision We advanced with majestic slowness, escorted by the
boats bearing the staff. It was very touching, and a deep national
sentiment seemed to hover over the whole scene.

Two days later we set sail for France, which was reached after a
passage of forty-one days. During the passage, feeling anxious at
having had no news from Europe for four months, I spoke several ships,
and amongst others, south of the line, I spoke a Dutch man-o'-war on
her way to Java, which gave us details of the coalition apparently
directed against Mehemet Ali, the Egyptian Viceroy, but aimed, in
reality, at France. Not knowing what might result from the performances
of the allied naval forces on the Syrian coast, we on board the frigate
and her consort, the Favorite, determined to take all usual precautions
in case of war; and each of us made ready, after his own fashion, for
his eventual departure to another world. There was, in most cases, a
great destroying of souvenirs, papers, and compromising correspondence.
General Gourgaud attracted our attention by the trembling care with
which he re-read a perfect mountain of notes in a feminine hand, which
he burnt one by one in a basin, gathering up the ashes and preserving
them in a bottle--not a bad way of keeping tender memories quite safe
from any inquisitiveness But all these warlike preparations were thrown
away. When the Belle Poule cast anchor at Cherbourg on November 30th,
the storm had passed by. My mission closed at Cherbourg, but I found
orders there to tranship the coffin on to a steamboat, and then take it
round to Paris by the Seine, my crew and that of the corvette Favorite
to form the escort. I will not tell the story of this conveying of the
body. At St Helena things had on the whole been done by the British
army on the one part and our naval forces on the other, with all the
chivalrous seriousness and dignity which always attend international
relations when confided to those who wear the sword. In France the
conveyance of the remains of Napoleon took on quite another character.
It was first and foremost a show, in which, as always happens in our
country, many people desired to play a part which was inappropriate and
sometimes ridiculous. I had often to interfere to get things put to
rights again. At La Bouille, for instance, which we reached at
nightfall, to meet the river flotilla to which we were to be
transferred, I was shown, as the vessel which was to receive the coffin
and the staff of the escort, a frightful-looking boat on which a sort
of hideous dais had been built, with all the frippery and plumes of the
Pompes Funebres, an official catafalque worthy of Carpentras or of
Brives-la-Gaillarde. I immediately gave orders for this masterpiece of
bad taste to be destroyed, a coat of black paint given to the boat, and
everything cleared forward, so as to place the coffin there well in
sight, and covered with a violet velvet pall. My men at once fell to
work at this transformation, when a gentleman in evening dress
advanced, and in a tone of great authority, forbade my sailors to touch
anything. "I got my orders from M. Cave (the Director of the Beaux
Arts) and from the Minister. All the decoration was designed by me, and
carried out under my direction, I hold to it, and I forbid anybody to
touch it," he said. "But, my good sir," I replied, "my orders have been
given, and will be carried out." My gentleman became so violent that I
desired him to leave the vessel instantly. "But surely you are not
going to put me ashore at this hour (it was almost dark) in the open
fields? I don't know where I am; I don't see any houses." "That's
nothing to me, you have been insolent, so it is your own fault. Put
this gentleman ashore." Four sailors advanced, but he gave in, and
nobody ever heard of him again. By the following morning the
transformation was complete, and the coffin moving unsheltered up the
course of the river, as though to take possession of the stream, was
much more striking than all the tinsel and canopies imaginable. The
whole voyage up to Courbevoie, the point of arrival, was a mere classic
reproduction of the usual official journey--flags, authorities girt
with tricolour sashes, clergy pronouncing blessings, shaking with
terror all the time, horses, gendarmes, curious crowds of holiday
makers, the only thing lacking being the speeches. From Courbevoie the
body was taken in procession through the Champs Elysees to the
Invalides, with the usual ceremonial, which I had already witnessed in
the cases of Charles X. and the Duchesse d'Orleans, but with one extra
point, the cold, and it was terrible.

At the Invalides four-and-twenty non-commissioned officers advanced to
carry the coffin into the church; but in spite of the most desperate
efforts the veterans could not succeed in lifting it, and I had to make
my sailors carry it. The King received the body at the entrance to the
nave, and there rather a comical scene took place. It appears that a
little speech, which I was to have delivered when I met my father, and
also the answer he was to give me, had been drawn up in Council, only
the authorities had omitted to inform me concerning it. So when I
arrived I simply saluted with my sword, and then stood aside. I saw
indeed that this silent salute, followed by retreat, had thrown
something out; but my father, after a moment's hesitation, improvised
some appropriate sentence, and the matter was afterwards arranged in
the Moniteur. The Church of the Invalides was full to overflowing, the
Chamber of Peers and the Chamber of Deputies being seated in the choir.
The success of the day fell to my brave sailors. Everybody was curious
to see them. Their athletic forms, easy gait, and kindly sunburnt faces
at once won over the general public, especially the feminine portion of
it; and then they were something new to that sight-loving Parisian
population, to whom so many have been given since then, that for want
of a better the only thing offered them at the present moment is Dinah
Salifou and the danse du ventre. What a fall here too, compared vith
the past! During the triumphal passage of the Emperor's ashes down the
Champs Elysees between two ranks of soldiers and National Guards, who
kept back an immense multitude, I had constantly amid the various
shouts caught one of "Down with traitors," which, at first, I did not
understand. I had been so far away. But it was explained to me that
this demonstration was aimed at my father and his ministers, guilty as
they were of having refused to launch France into a general war about
the Eastern question. I fancy my father troubled his head little about
these would-be-wise demonstrators, worthy forerunners of the Boulevard
braggarts who, at a later date, in 1870, so appositely shouted "a
Berlin." He had other matters to preoccupy him. The ease with which all
the Governments in Europe had leagued themselves together, to inflict a
moral check on France, under cover of the Pasha of Egypt, betrayed the
latent hostility of all those powers to our own country. Let us say it
outright. In the eyes of the European monarchies, the Government of
July, by virtue of its origin, and however wise and courageous the
policy of the King, my father, might have been, had always remained a
revolutionary, and therefore a hostile government Nothing else was
possible; and so at bottom it always will be, as long as we continue to
run in the rut along which we have been floundering for the last
hundred years. Look at any country in Europe, no matter which, and see
against whom the established Government carries on the domestic
struggle. Against Nihilists in Russia, Socialists in Germany,
anarchists and unquiet spirits of all kind everywhere, imitations of
those of our own country, and by them encouraged to press on the same
course of demand, and spoliation, and licence. And hence the necessary
consequence, that sovereigns and organized societies, whose first
desire is to exist, and neither to be overthrown nor despoiled, are
always ready to make common cause against that hotbed of bad example,
Revolutionary France. The events of 1840 showed this with the utmost
clearness; and in face of that demonstration the path of duty lay
clear. It was to lose no time in taking, without boastfulness, but also
without weakness, all the necessary measures against the danger which
was constantly threatening, although for the moment it was warded off.
Among these measures was one my father passionately desired, and which
he snatched from the Chambers by sheer tenacity--the fortification of
Paris. This tenacity was necessary, for the struggle was long, bitter,
and inexplicable While it lasted the heroes of the cafes greeted my
father in the streets and at reviews with insulting shouts. The cry,
"Down with the Bastille," had succeeded that of "Down with traitors,"
and all the fainthearted section would have knuckled down. All the
energy of the King, of my brother the Due d'Orleans--as eager as
himself on the question--and of the ministers, was needed to bring them
back into fighting line. The aid too of those patriots of all
shades--and thank God there still are some such!--who put national
independence and honour above party questions, had to be invoked. And
so Paris was fortified Who dares nowadays to say, that this was not a
convincing proof of the King's foresight as a ruler? Who dares to say,
that if hesitation, and desultoriness, and incapacity, and evil chance,
had not clung to the command of our armies in 1870, the German invasion
might not have been broken up upon those ramparts?

The winter of 1841 was also spent in raising our battalions of
Chasseurs-a-pied, the personal work of my eldest brother. I used often
to go and keep him company in the camp at St. Omer, while he was
employing all his great powers in organizing this force. When it was
done he gave a splendid fite, to which he invited the officers of the
English garrisons on the opposite coast, deputing me to receive them. A
few days later the population of Paris was surprised and delighted by
the sight of these ten splendid battalions, in their simple but elegant
uniform, pressing through the streets with swinging step, filling the
courtyard of the Tuileries, and forming up in the space of a few
minutes to be inspected by the King. These fine troops, with their
strong esprit de corps, have since then earned glory by many exploits
in all quarters of the globe. The number of battalions has been raised
from ten to thirty. The organization, given them at the outset by a
vigorous hand, has remained intact. Their uniform even is unchanged,
having escaped the prevalent mania for bringing everything down to the
same level of ugliness. The only thing gone is the original name,
Chasseurs d'Orleans; but what matters the name when the service remains!

My memories of the winter of 1841 are full of recollections concerning
our national defence. Mingled with them, however, are some others of a
less austere nature Masked balls were the rage that year. They were
given in all directions. I was only three-and-twenty, and thought them
all delightful Just at that moment Chicard--the famous Chicard--shared
the sceptre of the opera-balls with Musard, the chief of the orchestra.
A quiet-living worthy tradesman on weekdays, on important occasions an
officer in the National Guard, Monsieur L "le grand Chicard," dressed
in the most eccentric of costumes, led indescribable farandoles to the
sound of broken chairs and pistol shots, accompanied by Musard's
orchestra, at these entertainments. There were balls in the Opera
House, at the Renaissance, the Salle Ventadour, the Varietes--these
last the prettiest and the most fashionable and amusing. Not an evening
coat in the whole ball-room, everybody, men and women alike, in
costume, and everybody acquainted with everybody else. And what gaiety
and go there was about it all' You asked your partner in the
upper-boxes to dance with you, from the floor of the house, and she, to
lose no time, came down outside the balustrades, faithfully passed down
by friendly hands. When the quadrille was over you met jolly comrades
everywhere, with their partners astride on their shoulders, shaking
hands as it were two stories at a time. But there is an end to all
things. My two brothers--Nemours and Aumale--went off to fight in
Africa under General Bugeaud; and, in the month of May, I myself was
sent out to the Newfoundland station.

CHAPTER VIII

1841-1842

I left Cherbourg for Newfoundland on May 19th, 1841. It had been
arranged that I was to go by the North Sea, to put into the Texel, and
to go to the Hague to pay my respects in person to the King of the
Netherlands. Almost as soon as I had disembarked at the Helder, I went
on board the royal yacht, which was to take me to Alkmaar by the Noord
Holland Canal. This yacht, commanded by a very pleasant fellow, a naval
lieutenant, M. Dedel, was really charming. She had been built in the
seventeenth century, and had been used by Admirals Van Ruyter and Van
Tromp when they went to take up their commands. She was covered all
over with gilt carvings, the deckhouse in the stern especially, and
looked as if she had started freshly painted out of one of Backhuysen's
pictures. Once on board her, a legion of horses towed her along, full
trot, and I went to bed. When I awoke, I found the yacht moored beside
the quay at Alkmaar, the city of cheeses, whence a carriage took me to
Haarlem and Amsterdam, along the Haarlem Zee, which has been drained
dry since then, and transformed into splendid meadow land, as the
Zuider Zee will some day be. At Amsterdam I rushed to the museum, where
I was received by M. Apostol, the director, who had known the
Scheffers' father intimately at Rotterdam. Oh that museum! Oh those
prints! But M. de Bois-le-Comte, the French Minister, was pitiless. He
tore me away from all those masterpieces, and forced me to follow the
millround of the programme he had laid out for me. He dragged me off to
Zaandam (Saardam in French). This pretty Japanese-looking village, in
the midst of a wide polder, surrounded by over five hundred windmills,
looking like a row of gigantic sharpshooters, is a resort of pilgrims,
and the holy spot is the hut of Peter the Great. The wretched wooden
house, shut up in a sort of casemate, was the property of the Queen,
sister of the Emperor Nicholas, and the shanty was never mentioned by
her or to her but in the most feeling manner. Flectamus genua!
Leva...ate! Amongst other inscriptions there, I found the names of two
French actors, Dormeuil and Monval, which recall anything but pious
memories to my mind.

From Zaandam I went to the palace, to Van Ruyter's tomb, to the
pelicans in the Zoological Gardens, and then I escaped from the furious
Bois-le-Comte, who would have liked me never to go about except in a
glass case labelled "Ecce the Prince de Joinville." Very kind and very
witty he was, all the same, one of those finished diplomatists of the
old school--a disciple of M. de Talleyrand. He had been everywhere,
seen everything, observed everything, and he kept me under the charm of
his conversation all through my hasty trip in Holland. During the last
preceding years he had represented France in Portugal and Spain
successively, and had been with the two Queens--my future
sister-in-law--Dona Maria in Portugal, and the Regent Christina in
Spain, through all the most violent disturbances, struggles, and
dangers of the military conspiracies in those countries. He never tired
of talking about the courage of these two ladies, the nature of which
was very different in each case. The courage of the Queen of Portugal,
he said, was resolute, but mournful and gloomy. The example she set was
good, but she cast a chill on officers and men alike. Queen
Christina--passionate, a woman to her finger tips, careless of danger,
but shedding tears of nervous excitement when the bullets smashed her
windows and flew hither and thither about the apartments--magnetised
her defenders. In the one case you cried "Welcome, Death!" in the other
you shouted "Forward!" Very interesting indeed was the description
Bois-le-Comte gave me of the La Granja conspiracy. How, having been
warned in the middle of the night of the danger threatening Queen
Christina and her daughters, he got up in haste to hurry to their
assistance, but desired, first of all, to warn the British Minister and
carry him along with him. How, when he reached the house of the
minister, Mr. Villiers, afterwards Lord Clarendon, he rushed without
meeting a soul into his bedroom, where the bed-curtains shook
convulsively at the noise of his entrance, and the head alone of the
minister appeared, saying, "I'll follow you," while a soft voice tried
to detain him, with all the tenderest appeals in the Spanish language.
"I took myself off double quick," said Bois-le-Comte to me; "but I had
recognised the voice."

From Amsterdam we went to the Hague, and as soon as I got there I asked
to see the King. "Let him come at once" was the reply.

King William, young-looking still, with a graceful figure and a kindly
engaging face, framed with a fringe of grizzling beard, had a loud
voice and a hearty laugh. He was witty in conversation. The Queen, whom
I never saw laugh, nor even smile, talked cleverly too, but she picked
her words too obviously. Her daughter, the young Princess Sophia, now
Grand-Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, was clever too. I was watching her dance
at a ball one night, wearing a pretty gown, the chief adornment of
which was an eastern scarf, when her father, to whom I was talking,
said, "Marmotte (her pet name in the family) looks like a Bayadere
to-day." And indeed she had all the grace and charm of one.

My stay at the Hague was one succession of gatherings, dinners, balls,
at which the cordiality of my reception never failed for one minute. It
touched me much, and I have kept a grateful memory of it, for there was
some merit, on the King's part, in its being so. Had we not largely
contributed by our support of the Belgian revolution to lessening his
kingdom by one half? And there had been yet another wound to his
vanity. In his youth King William, then Prince of Orange, full of eager
bravery, had gone to serve in Spain under the Duke of Wellington. He
had been wounded in the ranks of the British army at Waterloo, and on
the strength of these antecedents he had offered himself in 1815 as a
candidate for the hand of Princess Charlotte, heir-presumptive to the
Crown of England. He had been ousted. And by whom? By Prince Leopold of
Saxe-Coburg, whom we had just made King of the Belgians. In spite of
these causes for coldness, at all events, the welcome I was given by
the King, his family, and by every class of that honest and
well-behaved Dutch race, was marked by a constantly increasing
kindliness, which filled Bois-le-Comte and his very witty secretary, La
Rosiere, with delight. Just at the moment of parting, the King made me
a present of an admirable copy in reduced size of Rembrandt's Anatomy
Lesson, which hung in his study, saying, "You are going to
Newfoundland; you shall bring me back a dog in exchange," which
commission I faithfully executed.

To finish up my visit to Holland, I paid a visit to the Naval Arsenal
at Flushing, and as I passed through Zeeland I saw from afar, and not
without emotion, the belfry towers of Bergen-op-Zoom, a town which
witnessed the performance of two of the most brilliant exploits in our
annals. The first--the taking of the stronghold by assault, by Marshal
de Lowendal's army, in 1747. The second--the assault delivered on it on
the 8th and 9th of March, 1814, by the whole English army, and
triumphantly repulsed by a handful of soldiers and sailors commanded by
General Bizannet. The assault under Marshal de Lowendal has been
commemorated first of all in a celebrated song, and later by an
admirable drawing in body colour by Van Blarenberg, which is to be seen
in the Versailles Museum. But the exploit of 1814 has been almost lost
sight of amid our disasters and the subsequent invasion. Very few
people are aware that the British army made a forcible attack on
Bergen-op-Zoom, getting into the town by the port at low tide, and
scaling the ramparts, led and backed up by the inhabitants, who had
risen in favour of the House of Orange, and that the enemy's columns
got as far as the middle of the town, whence, after twelve hours'
fighting, they were driven over the ramparts by the resolute bravery of
the defending force, leaving more prisoners in its hands than its own
fighting men numbered. The details of this splendid page of military
history should be read as told by Colonel Legrand of the Engineers, who
commanded under General Bizannet. In them, among other dramatic
incidents, will be found an episode about a bellringer, which is almost
identical with the one Sardou has incorporated in his fine play Patrie.

From the Texel, or, to be more exact, from Neu-Diep to Newfoundland, by
the north coast of Scotland, the passage, though we made it without
disaster, was terribly trying to both our crews and our ships, which
last were much damaged, and lost nearly all their sails. An incessant
series of gales kept us under green seas nearly all the time. Upon
these followed thick fogs, and finally we fell among numberless
icebergs. So it was with a lively sense of relief that I found myself
anchored at last within the haven of Le Croc, the headquarters of our
squadron during the fishing season. The haven was itself so obstructed
with ice that on the very night of my arrival, with the help of my cook
and some tins of jam, I was able to serve up Neapolitan ices to my
staff, like Tortoni himself.

There was very near being a serious breach of discipline on board the
frigate during our passage. A sailor refused to obey, and threatened
one of the midshipmen--a serious act of insubordination, which,
according to the laws then in force, entailed corporal punishment on
its perpetrator. I immediately called a court-martial, which, having
heard witnesses and defendant, according to regulations, sentenced the
man to a certain number of strokes with the rope's end. The hour for
carrying out the sentence came, the crew was mustered, the officers in
their places and under arms. I was in my cabin, just buckling on my
sword, when my second in command came in like a whirlwind. "They are
going to ask for mercy," he cried; "it's your own fault. The men know
your hatred of corporal punishment. They are going to presume on it. I
beg you'll give me leave to run the first man that opens his mouth
through with my sword." Up till that time I had avoided the use of
corporal punishment, a matter which had been made all the easier for me
by the good feeling and quiet behaviour of the crew I had had under my
command. But this time the scandal had been notorious, the punishment
must be exemplary, and the law applied without mercy. What would become
of the authority of an isolated handful of officers, on the high seas,
among hundreds of seamen, if they had no possible recourse to force, to
punishment drill, or to long terms of imprisonment? What, again, would
become of that purely moral influence, which is indispensable on board
a ship which is practically always at sea, if the maintenance of
discipline was ever liable to the slightest failure? Filled as I was
with even more than the ordinary sense of the imperious claims of duty
on the officer in command, I reassured my subordinate. "Make your mind
easy," I told him. "I would be brayed in a mortar sooner than tolerate
one moment's hesitation in carrying out the sentence. I shall stand at
the head of the crew, and have the punishment carried out in front of
me. The men will read my countenance and nobody will stir, I'll answer
for it!" And so it was. I took my place, all eyes turned on me, and
everything passed off according to rule--To say the scene was not a
painful one to me would be to tell a lie. But duty has to come first.

As my second in command had said, I had a horror of corporal punishment
as laid down by the Convention, a relic of another age, when navy crews
were recruited amongst a set of vagabonds picked up in all quarters. I
thought it degrading. Often, among my brother officers, I had blamed
the unmeasured use I had seen made of it on board ships I did not
command. And glad indeed I was when it was done away with. A commanding
officer invested, and justly so, with unlimited authority on board his
own ship, is sure by intelligence, firmness, and sense of duty, to find
other means than the lash of making the saving law of absolute
obedience to superiors respected, without going such lengths as the
captain of an American warship, who, on his own responsibility, hanged
one of his midshipmen, nearly related to the Minister for Naval
Affairs, who had been guilty of attempted mutiny, from the yardarm.

I will not enlarge here on what has become the Newfoundland Question,
which I have naturally had to study in all its aspects. Suffice it to
recall the fact that when the Island of Newfoundland became British
territory, the conquerors ceded the exclusive right of fishing on half
the coast to France, with the reservation that we were only to remain
temporarily, during the fishing season, and have no permanent
establishments on the island. When these fishing rights were conceded
to us (and they soon became very important, employing as they did over
twenty thousand sailors, and turning the Newfoundland fisheries into
one of the chief training grounds for our service sailors) the island
was well-nigh uninhabited. There are no opportunities for conflict in a
desert country. But little by little the island grew populous. On the
part where we had the fishing rights, the "French Shore," a very
limited, almost insignificant, English population gathered, and, oddly
enough, we ourselves brought it there, desirous as we were to leave
caretakers to look after and keep in order, from one season to the
other, the indispensable establishments for the curing, drying, and
salting of the codfish, which we ourselves could not occupy
permanently. Everywhere, during my cruise, I found this English
population, living by us, and on excellent terms with our
Newfoundlanders. To such a pitch was the excellence of these terms
occasionally carried, that paying a visit one day to a worthy
sea-captain from St. Malo, who had laid up his ship during the fishing
season, and settled on shore, in an English house, I saw two chubby
children burst in, shouting "Papa, papa!" while a young and pretty
Englishwoman, sitting by, never lifted her eyes from her work. "The
little geese," said the worthy Breton, "see me so often, they've got
into the habit of calling me papa!"

This entente cordiale would no doubt have continued indefinitely, and
nobody would have heard any mention of a Newfoundland Question,
endangering the international relations between the two countries, if
the southern portion of the island, entirely English as it was, and
with a temperate climate, had not increased so rapidly in population as
to have a constitution, liberal institutions, a Parliament, and the
consequent elections. The electioneering agents forthwith found they
needed a sensational popular platform, and this platform has ended by
becoming something like the "Irredenta" movement in Italy, a claim for
national rights over the national soil. "Newfoundland for the
Newfoundlanders." There lies the whole of the Newfoundland Question.
Locally, nobody bothers their head about it, but in the press, and on
the phantom-haunted ground of electoral politics, it has kindled many
passions, and may very likely engender ruin and bloodshed some of these
days. These facts taken for granted, I return to my personal
recollections. Unlike most of my brother officers, I found my stay in
Newfoundland (in the summer months, during which we were stationed
there, be it understood) very pleasant. The island is a hilly one,
covered with pine forests. Where the woods fail, there are lakes and
rivers, admirably clear, and swarming with salmon and trout. There was
plenty of game, and all this in the midst of the uninhabited region
where every one can enjoy the completest liberty, with no limits but
those imposed by his own tastes and endurance. If there were no
drawback to all these advantages, Newfoundland in the summer-time would
be a paradise, and there is no such thing as that upon our globe. The
drawback is the flies, little black ones, called the "black fly," the
pest of all northern countries, against which one is quite defenceless.
They get in everywhere; no preservative stops them; no ointment nor any
daubing repels them. During a hunting excursion I made to the Isle of
Groix, so christened by some native of L'Orient, which is about eight
miles off Le Croc, I saw some of my comrades with their heads swelled
up like a hydrocephalous patient's, so that their eyes had disappeared,
half mad with pain from the stings of that infernal fly, and one of our
sailor servants lay on the ground, refusing to move, and begging us
with tears to put a rifle to his head and end his agony.

This Isle of Groix swarmed with creatures that had come over the ice
from the mainland in the winter season. Its steep edges, covered with
an impenetrable arborescent growth, enclosed a great treeless plateau,
a "lande." We used to get on to this lande by walking up the bed of a
rivulet, and once on it we had perfect massacres of winged game,
especially of that sort of gray grouse called ptarmigan by the English.
It was these birds' pairing season. They never flew away, and when we
killed one the other would ruffle up its feathers in a fury and fly
pecking at our legs. The wooded sides of the island must have been full
of reindeer, to judge by the quantities of tracks to be seen on every
side. If we had had one or two hounds to send into the thickets we
might have made hecatombs of them.

From Le Croc I went round all our neighbouring fishing stations--Saint
Julien, the Baie Rouge, &c. Cod were extraordinarily numerous that
year. One haul of the seine at the Baie Rouge brought in eighty-four
thousand cod-fish in one day. It was the golden age of the fishery. Now
the fish have deserted the eastern coast of Newfoundland. Our fishermen
have to take their boats and anchor on the big bank, and there they
stay for months, tossed about by every tempest. They go out
line-fishing in small boats, which are frequently lost in the fog and
never heard of again. Often, too, the fishing vessel herself is cut in
two, in fog or darkness, by some transatlantic liner steaming seventeen
knots an hour, which is out of sight in a few seconds, while the
unlucky boat founders with all hands. A hard and a risky life our bank
fishermen lead. But they come back men, and well-seasoned men too!

From the eastern coast of the island the Bette-Poule took her way to
the western side, passing through the Straits of Belleisle, a narrow
channel which parts Newfoundland from Labrador. The amount of difficult
navigation we met with going through the straits was really
extraordinary. The channel was full of ice-floes, either stranded or
driven about by the currents. A thick fog came down on us, with
zenithal aurora borealis, the electric action of which threw out every
compass, standard and otherwise, on board. No seeing, no steering!
After having been in a very critical position at the entrance of
Forteau Bay, a point on the Labrador coast celebrated for wrecks, I
took the frigate into the haven of Ingornachoix, where we made some
considerable stay, necessitated by the condition of my crew's health.
For some time it had been suffering from the exceptional fatigues of
the cruise. During our stay in Le Croc, in spite of its being a
breathing time, and of every kind of care, many men had been ailing,
and the sickness ended by taking the form of a somewhat serious
epidemic of smallpox. The best thing we could do to stop the mischief
and prevent it from increasing and becoming permanent (which would have
resulted in closing almost all foreign ports to us) was to isolate the
sick. I therefore lost no time in having a hospital constructed on a
pretty wooded isle, which lay just at the entrance to the place where
we were anchored, and in it I settled all my sick men, doing everything
in my power to dry and disinfect the frigate meanwhile. This double
measure was successful, and when we left the bay my crew was completely
restored to health and vigour.

I learnt several things during this long period in harbour, the first
of which was the discovery of the immense quantity of lobsters
frequenting the coast. The first day my men went to walk on shore they
brought back nine hundred, which they had caught among the rocks, and
that without the least difficulty. I do not know whether the
Ingornachoix lobster was like Bayard, without reproach, but without
fear he most certainly was. It was quite enough, when one caught sight
of him in shallow water, to poke a stick at him. He instantly sprang
furiously forth, laid hold of it with his claws, and absolutely refused
to let go. This abundance of lobsters, turned to commercial account
later, when it became known, gave rise to the Lobster Fisheries
Question, one of the stalking-horses of the English Irredentists.
Furthermore, I discovered that since the codfish were becoming rare on
the French Shore of the Straits of Belleisle, our fishermen, to remedy
the scarcity, went over and poached on the English coast of
Labrador--the principal drawback to which contravention of the
agreement was that it gave the English a pretext for doing the same
thing. As the English cruisers not unnaturally shut their eyes to
irregularities which created precedents that might be harmful to us,
our ships of war had either to sanction them by their presence, or, by
opposing them, to exercise in a foreign country a right of keeping
order which was questionable, to say the least of it; both of them
things to be avoided, if possible. And our orders, in fact, were never
to be seen at Labrador. This regulation I conformed to; but behold, one
fine day, a schooner from our local station at St. Pierre Miquelon
casts anchor alongside of me, and the following colloquy ensues between
the lieutenant in command and myself:--

"Where are you going?"

"To Labrador."

"But you know the state of things. There are the gravest objections to
taking one of our warships there."

"I know; but I have special and precise orders from the Minister for
Naval Affairs."

"What orders?"

"I have been ordered to go to Labrador to buy a dog for one of the
secretaries to the minister."

"That's what you have been sent from St. Pierre Miquelon for?"

"Yes."

I had to bow to this. I could not set up my authority as
commander-in-chief against that of the minister, so let the schooner go
on her compromising mission. Soon after, and not without regret, I set
sail to continue our cruise Time had passed swiftly by, between the
attention of every kind the health of the crew had necessitated, the
drill of every sort we had devoted ourselves to, and the gun practice
in the virgin forest, during which the ancient trees had been mown down
by our projectiles We had lived a Robinson Crusoe sort of life on the
largest scale--it is a sort of life I have always had a weakness for.
After building our hospital, we had made limekilns for disinfecting the
frigate, we had been wood-cutters, and charcoal burners, and
carpenters. We had made ourselves spare masts and spars. We had drained
ponds too; explored in all directions, hunting and fishing, and
discovered lakes and rivers.

Though we made good bags during these excursions, they consisted of
small game only. Once I fired at, and to my deep regret I missed, a
silver fox--the animal dressed by nature in the richest and rarest of
all her furs. There were abundant tracks of bear and caribou. We caught
sight once of a huge gray wolf, striped like a zebra. But none of these
larger beasts fell to our guns. We could not have got at them even with
hounds, so continuously far stretching and impenetrable the forest was,
and the only thing we had to help us was Fox, the ship's dog, an
excellent pointer by the way, the pet of everybody on board. He fell
into the sea one day when there was a strong breeze, and was picked up,
still swimming sturdily along to catch up the frigate, on board of
which he had a regular ovation when he got back.

We wound up our Newfoundland cruise with St. George's Bay, the last on
the French Shore, and the only point at which any difficulty was raised
about the exercise of our rights. We there found, in fact, a large
fast-growing and increasingly prosperous Anglo-Canadian village, and in
the presence of its inhabitants we went through the ceremony of
formally forbidding them to fish, which ceremony was greeted by
protests both amicable and bantering. Amicable, because half the
population were French Canadians, talking our own language with a
strong St. Malo accent, and in spite of everything else, the similarity
of origin, language, religion, and habits, established friendly
relations between us and them. Bantering, because first of all our
fishermen no longer frequented St. George, and secondly, because the
prohibition, which was compulsory during the four or five days in the
year during which our warships were present, became simply a dead
letter during the other three hundred and six days of the year. It was
easy, of course, to see that our exclusive right to fish could not be
maintained when once a sufficient indigenous population had settled
there, but it was no less easy to judge that some local arrangement
concerning these exceptional places, conciliating every interest, might
easily be made. Would that be possible nowadays, when electioneering
palaver has embittered the whole business? After leaving St. George, we
spent a long time hunting for our colony of St. Pierre Miquelon in
continuous fogs, and only succeeded in finding it by means of a plan of
my own invention. The weather happening to be moderate, I had several
triangular soundings made while we were under sail, and then
endeavoured to make the mathematical triangle thus obtained tally as to
depth and nature of bottom with Captain Lavaud's chart of the
Newfoundland soundings. So excellent is the chart in question, that the
plan was successful, and gave us bearings by which we got a direct line
for the shore. St. Pierre Miquelon is a bare, wild, hideous islet, but
with a first-class port. Admirable as a victualling station and mart
for our fishermen, its military value as far as our trade is concerned
is absolutely nil. Whatever may be done for it, it will always be at
the mercy of whoever is master of the seas in time of war.

At Halifax, whither I went to meet the officer commanding the British
naval station, we were put into quarantine on account of three
convalescents, relics of the epidemic we had been suffering from. But
it was taken off, thanks to the generous intervention of the
Governor-General of Nova Scotia, Lord Falkland, a splendid-looking man,
well known in Parisian society. Nobody could have been more obliging
nor kinder than this "grand seigneur" and his wife, the daughter of
William IV., were to us.

If Nova Scotia as seen from the sea, with its gloomy coast guarded by
numberless black reefs, recalls that of Brittany, the same resemblance
strikes the traveller who pushes towards the interior of the country,
through its deep and smiling bays; and Halifax Bay in particular, when
its fresh and verdant surroundings are lighted up by brilliant
sunshine, leaves nothing to be desired in the way of charm. I saw it
thus when I arrived, in all the excitement of a regatta, with the
peculiar feature of a race for birch-bark canoes, paddled with
incredible vigour by Mic Mac squaws, or Indian women, in blue blouses
and floating black hair. What a splendid colony Nova Scotia is, too!

The advance post of the huge Canadian territory, protected by its
almost insular position from the rigours of the northern climate, with
all its ports open (not only Halifax, where the fleets of the whole
world could find absolute safety, maritime and strategic, at once, but
Sydney too, surrounded by immense beds of coal), while the St Lawrence
is still choked with ice.

Our short stay in port was wound up by a great dinner given by my
gunroom officers to those of the English frigate Winchester. The meal
was of the merriest, if I may judge by the toasts, the cheers, and the
songs I heard; and the merriment continued on shore, whither the young
people betook themselves together. One of the English midshipmen, a
good-looking lad with a thick crop of carroty hair, returned on board
his own ship with beautiful jet black locks, to the great astonishment
of the first lieutenant; while I beheld two of my cadets appear at a
ball given by the officers of the garrison and indulge in such a
remarkable style of dancing, that I was forced to give them immediate
orders to return on board the Belle-Poule. One of these cadets, by the
way, was a Turk, called Saly. His story was rather a strange one. He
was the son of Saly Pasha, the pasha of Athens, and was a child in his
mother's arms when the city was carried by assault by the Greeks and
their philhellenic supporters, in I know not which year of the Greek
insurrection. All the defenders were put to the sword, and in the
excitement of the fight Saly's mother was murdered, but she had
strength, as she died, to throw her infant into the arms of a
Wurtembergian officer. He, much embarrassed by the gift, passed the
child on, having previously christened it Gottlieb, to a French naval
lieutenant of the name of Quernel, who commanded a vessel off that
coast. When Quernel returned to Toulon, my Aunt Adelaide heard the
incident mentioned. She interested herself in the little Turk, and had
him brought up amongst us. The boy turned out well, entered the navy,
and was a post captain when he died. From Halifax we went to New York,
the frantic bustle and stir in which place contrasted strangely, in my
eyes, with the calm of the Newfoundland deserts and the placidity of
the Blue Noses, as the inhabitants of Nova Scotia are nicknamed. We
were at New York to do some indispensable revictualling, consequent on
the exceptionally rough voyage we had had. Besides much other damage,
we had lost all our sails; they had been carried away one after the
other, and it was absolutely necessary to have at least one set in good
trim, instead of the patched rags still remaining to us, before
undertaking our winter voyage across the ocean.

I took advantage of the time these repairs took up to go and pay my
respects to the President at Washington and thence to make a rapid dash
into the West, in the footsteps of our ancient pioneers, and up to the
farthest limits of civilisation (as they were then, in 1841).

The thing that strikes one most on arriving in the United States, and
in New York in particular, as I have already said, is the extraordinary
bustle that reigns everywhere, and which really stuns one at first. One
feels so bewildered that any idea of a picturesque description
disappears. The only thing one is aware of is bustle. Bustle on land,
where everybody seems to rush as if they were demented--bustle on the
water, where one keeps wondering why the ships of all sizes passing at
full speed in every direction do not collide every other minute. In
complete contrast to our boulevards, Broadway, when you walk along it,
does not seem to contain a single idler. Are there any idle men in
America? Yes, there are some millionaires, who pull up when they have
made their fortunes. Their fellow-citizens assert that they are always
ill at ease, amidst the general activity, and that they go and settle
down in their idleness in Paris, among people like themselves, whose
frivolity they end by copying. They are looked upon as "demoralised
Americans." But they are few in number. As each man has only himself to
reckon on, as he has no hoped-for inheritance to wait for and discount
in idleness, seeing the man in possession owes nothing to his children,
nor to anybody else, and is free to dispose of his property as he
chooses, everybody being free to make his will as he likes, so each man
feels that if he wants to get on he must work. And is not this the
chief cause of the vigour and energy of the great American nation? If
Broadway is a tumult of business, that in the port of New York is worth
seeing too. This port is at the confluence of two arms of the sea, in
front of the public walk called the Battery. Here, towards five o'clock
in the evening, when the steamboats start, the huge floating palaces
may be seen shooting off in every direction, shrieking hoarsely. It is
a maritime pandemonium. In it the American is in his element. Dressed
in black, with a stove-pipe hat, the quid in his cheek causing him to
look as though he grinned sardonically, with one hand on the steering
wheel and the other on the engine-room bell, he drives his ship full
speed through the throng with an audacity, decision, and coolness which
made me shiver at first!

In this manner I left New York and passed along the coast of New Jersey
on my way to Washington, but not without receiving a very friendly
welcome from the naval officer commanding there, Commodore Perry, a
remarkable man, who, half by persuasion and half by force, concluded
the first treaty with Japan, thus opening up that interesting
country--I will not say to civilisation (for I do not know that Japan
has progressed on that account), but to trade, and intercourse with
nations of European origin.

In the very first train I got into I found myself opposite a big man
wearing a moustache and imperial, with a huge walking stick between his
legs, and was told he was the King, or rather Prince, Murat. Next we
passed a fine country property belonging to King Joseph Buonaparte, and
involuntarily I thought of a certain passage in the works of Voltaire,
where Candide meets all the dethroned kings at Venice. There were
others even then whose names I might have added to those of Murat and
Joseph, and the number was to be increased before long. "Special line
of Paris goods," we might almost say, in commercial phrase! Has this
sort of export trade answered with us?

I saw Philadelphia once more, as charming as ever. There was a fine
performance, that night, in the Chestnut Street Theatre, and I had sent
to take places for it. But when I arrived I saw a huge poster over the
door--"Prince de Joinville at 8.30," and beat an instant and hasty
retreat. As soon as I got to Washington I repaired to the White House
to pay my respects to General Tyler. He was a blunt-spoken man with a
big nose, who had successively filled the posts of governor of his own
State (Virginia) and of President of the United States, in each case in
consequence of the death of the actual incumbents, whose deputy he was.
He could not have done better in a hereditary monarchy! Our time at
Washington was taken up with an interchange of compliments of all
sorts. A dinner at the President's, visits to and from the diplomatic
corps, a huge reception, at which I shook hands at least three thousand
times, at the White House. And bouquets, too, in the "language of
flowers!"

We paid a visit, too, to the Naval Arsenal. A very nice little arsenal
it was, in a bad situation, but admirably arranged, and only put in
that particular place to serve as a sort of school of elementary
instruction to the ignorance of Congress, and interest its members in
naval matters. When I say Congress, I should rather say the Chamber of
Representatives. In the United States the Senate is the body which has
the real power, and which actually governs. This assembly, very few in
numbers, especially at the time of which I speak, chosen by the
Chamber, and of which the members were almost invariably re-elected,
had leisure to learn the necessities of administrative government and
to become a permanent body, whose action was both lasting and
intelligent, like the Council of Ten at Venice or the committee of the
Comedie Franjaise. But the Representative Chamber, full as it was of
journalists, who had never studied anything beyond the art of
attracting subscriptions to their papers, knew nothing whatever.
Luckily it only formed a second wheel in the Constitution, but, in
spite of that fact, anything likely to add to its enlightenment was
useful.

I left Washington highly gratified with my reception, but glad to have
got it over, and carried away a most agreeable recollection of our
minister, M. de Bacourt, a most delightfully witty man--a family
virtue, it would seem, to judge by his niece and grand-niece, Madame de
Mirabeau and Madame de Martel (Gyp).

From Washington I went to Buffalo, the train running off the rails on
the way, and that, too, on a viaduct, on which the engine, having
broken through the roadway, was hung up in the framework, like a fly in
a spider's web. I was anxious to go, via the great lakes, to Green Bay
on Lake Michigan, and thence starting from Mackinaw, the old Indian
Michillimackinac, to follow up the track of our officers and soldiers
and missionaries, who pushed on till they discovered the Mississippi.

[Illustration: a large ship on a river]

It was in 1672 that Talon, the Superintendent of "La Nouvelle France,"
having heard from the Indians of the existence of a great river, sent
out an expedition to discover it under Father Marquette, who had great
influence over the Indian tribes. Crossing the great lakes, he landed
at Green Bay, and pushing westwards, he soon reached the "Father of
Waters." It was for Green Bay that I too embarked, at Buffalo, on Lake
Erie, on board the staunch steamer Columbus, the last boat to go to
that place so late in the season (in mid-winter). Our boat was staunch
indeed, some consolation for the slowness of her pace. Of this she soon
gave us proof, for she ran with an awful shock, going eight knots an
hour in the dark, on to a reef of rocks, stopped short, and heeled
over. A big wave caught her and lifted her a second time; there was
another bump. But with the third wave she got across the reef. I rushed
towards the engine, thinking everything must be smashed and the side of
the ship gaping open. But no, not at all!

The captain, who had been taken aback for a moment, merely sent his
quid from one cheek to the other, without saying a word. The whole
thing was over. And, indeed, that was not the only unforeseen incident
during our voyage. We spent one whole night aground in the St. Clair
Lake. Nothing I can say will give any idea of the recklessness with
which the ship was navigated. To begin with, there were no charts; you
went at haphazard, according to information that had come down by
tradition, and yet these lakes are really small oceans, with currents,
and fogs, and squalls coming off the coasts, just like the sea. The
navigation must have been just the same in 1679, when Lassalle, an
officer in the Canadian army, launched the first ship, which he called
the Griffon, in honour of the griffin in the arms of his commanding
officer, the Marquis de Frontenac.

To danger by sea must be added danger by fire for our staunch Columbus.
The boilers were heated with wood--aloewood--out of which pencils and
cigar-boxes are made. It made a very pleasant smell, but being piled up
pell mell in the hold, against the furnaces, it caught fire several
times in my presence, and the stokers would just throw a little water
on it to put it out. On the deck the very high pressure engine worked
exposed and unprotected, amidst sheep and oxen and packages of all
kinds, which were frequently shot against it by the roll of the waves,
and above the whole there rose two stories of cabins, built of light
planking, as thin as paper, quite incapable of standing against the
most moderate seas, but which caught the wind, and made the ship
exceedingly unsteady. During a squall, luckily for us a short one,
which caught us on Lake Michigan, in the middle of the night, the whole
fabric began to give way. I was woke by the water coming in and the
crackling sound of the damage going on in all directions. So I got up,
and found all the Americans on board wearing lifebelts, and greeting me
with the remark, "Sir, you are a sailor, but there are more risks on
our lakes than on the ocean!" and quite right they were.

It was a long passage, and we put in to several places on our way.
First into Detroit, formerly the French Fort Pontchartrain, and now
become the capital of Michigan State. Opposite Detroit runs the
Canadian shore, to which we are borne by a steam ferry boat, and where
the same contrast strikes me as at Niagara. On the American side I find
a very pretty town, with all the comforts of civilisation, a scene of
hard-working activity. On the Canadian shore I see a village of poor
cottages, surrounded with apple orchards, like a village in Normandy,
in front of which the red sentry marches up and down, as stiff as an
automaton. The inhabitants of the said village, French both in feature
and appearance, hurried up in delight when they heard us speaking the
language of their forefathers. "It's the only tongue we know. We don't
want our children to learn any other!" And yet they have been English
for over a century! A strange contrast, indeed, this fidelity to the
memory of their national origin, to their not less sincere fidelity to
the conquering regime, which assures to them the right of willing their
property as they choose, and has freed them from the administrative
tyranny which seems, unfortunately, to cling to us under every regime.

From Detroit we went up the St. Clair River to Lake Huron. The great
river was a magnificent sight, with its banks covered with mighty
forests in all the splendour of their autumnal colouring. Here and
there, on the American side, stood some log cabin, an emigrant's first
shelter. Then we would come on a sawmill, that first of all necessaries
in such a country. On the British side now and again, we saw Indian
wigwams, Huron or Chippewa. At the entrance of Lake Huron bad weather
came on; it snowed, and we took shelter in a bay, where we moored the
ship to the shore close to one of those American forts that fringe the
Indian frontier. They are all alike, these forts; a battlemented wall
of thick planks, with banquettes for riflemen, and loopholed for
heavier guns. Within each are the barracks and the officers' quarters.
This particular fort was called Fort Gratiot. In 1688 its name was Fort
St. Joseph, and it had a French garrison, commanded by Baron de Houtou.
During this stoppage we had an amusing adventure. Our only fellow
passengers on the Columbus, some five or six in number, were an
American officer on his way to take command at Fort Winnepeg; a
Methodist missionary and his wife, who spent the day singing hymns
together, and retired to their cabin at night with all the eagerness of
the most enthusiastic fondness; a young dressmaker going to join her
family at Green Bay; and finally, Miss Mary, the chambermaid, a
handsome, fair, freckled girl, liked by everybody on board. Tired of
being on shipboard, the whole band of passengers, male and female, and
Miss Mary into the bargain, went off to walk and amuse themselves on
shore. Suddenly the people in the fort got wind of our presence. The
major commanding and his officers hastened up, asking where the prince
was, and invited us all into the fort, to rest and refresh ourselves
with them. It was impossible to refuse such a kind and cordial
invitation. It was equally impossible to break up our party--that would
have been unmannerly, and contrary to American ideas of propriety and
equality alike. So we entered a drawing-room, in which the wives and
daughters of the officers quartered in the fort were assembled. They
seemed to falter for a moment, when they beheld our lady companions.
They scanned the Methodist and his wife, and took their measure at once
But the dressmaker and Miss Mary, hanging on the arms of two of my
companions, seemed to puzzle them. Anyhow they hastened towards them,
took them by the hand, led them to the place of honour on the sofa, and
began the conversation with "Do you speak English?" I don't recollect
now how it all went off, but I know we were soon back on board, Miss
Mary and all, under a salute of twenty-one guns.

Mackinaw, a small wooded island, with high shores, and a fort over
which the stars and stripes of the Union floated, looked very
picturesque as we approached it. There was a ruin on one side of the
American guard-house, to which we lost no time in climbing through the
woods. It was the old French fort, and our hearts swelled at the
thought that the French flag was the first to float over this little
Gibraltar, when, some hundred and sixty years previously, our officers
took possession of this magnificent country in the name of their king.

Once more, with the eye of fancy, we saw our white-coated soldiers
mounting guard on those ramparts, whence their gaze must have wandered
over the confluence of the three great lakes and the immense empire
they had won for France, while the Indian tribes hurried from all
quarters to bend the knee to the Great Chief of the Pale Faces. It was
a great and glorious epoch; and what traveller would not feel deeply
stirred when he comes upon such bitter memories of the vanished
grandeur of his country?

Our good ship Columbus got to Green Bay at last, and, stirring up the
mud which obstructs the entrance to Fox River, bore us up that fine
stream and deposited us in front of a large store, surrounded by fifty
houses, there or thereabouts. This settlement was not in the United
States, but on Wisconsin Territory, an embryo State, not populous
enough as yet, nor sufficiently organised, to be called a State, nor
have a voice in the deliberations of the American Union. The country on
the left bank of the Fox River was not even a Territory; it was a
No-Man's Land, where any man might settle where and how he pleased.
Like all the places I had passed through, Green Bay, the "Baie Verte"
of our forefathers (and it still deserves its title) was occupied in
the first instance by the French. After Father Marquette's exploring
journey, twenty soldiers, two sergeants, and four bandsmen, under the
command of Lieutenant du Roussel, were sent thither in 1684 by M. de
Beauchamptrelle, commanding the king's troops at Mackinaw. Now, as I
have said, it possessed a hotel and about fifty houses, inhabited for
the most part by merchants trading with the Redskins. Everybody talked
French, and everybody hastened forward when the boat arrived to ask for
news from the civilised world.

A few Indians, silent and motionless, wrapped in their blankets, looked
on indifferently at the bustle. Squaws shod with moccasins, and the
toes of their little feet turned in, passed by without raising their
heads, their papooses sitting astride on their backs. The somewhat
numerous Indian tribes inhabiting the country were the Menomenis, the
Winnepeg Indians, and the Iroquois, which last had emigrated from
Canada to escape the English yoke. I much regretted not having time to
pay a visit to their wigwams. To the very last they were our most
devoted allies in our wars with the English. I had a talk with one of
the chiefs sons, who told me he still had Montcalm's sword in his
possession, and preserved it as a sacred relic. According to his story,
during the battle of Quebec, probably just at the moment when Montcalm
was mortally wounded, his sword was hung up in a tree, whence it was
taken by one of his faithful Indian followers, and it has always
remained with his tribe. After a great deal of difficulty we succeeded
in procuring saddle horses for ourselves, and a farmer's waggon for our
baggage, and we set forth for the Mississippi. The whole journey was
most interesting. There were no roads--the merest track through woods
interspersed with prairies--along which we went to the lake and fort of
Winnepeg. Beyond that lake we knew there would be nothing but prairie,
stretching far and wide, over which we must steer as though we were at
sea, or else be guided by the mysterious instinct of some trapper. We
met many Redskins in the woods, all busy hunting. Game was very
abundant--waterfowl on the streams, flights of prairie hens (a sort of
grouse), and herds of buck, which constantly crossed our line of march
Here and there was a clearing or first attempt at cultivation, round a
squatter's log cabin.

We were following the first skirmishing line of that army of
civilisation which is overrunning in its steady advance all that wild
country which was once the Indian's sole domain. When this advance
guard collects at any given point, a hotel rises, and beside it the
store where a trader will deal in every kind of merchandise, and
especially in brandy, that most destructive of poisons to all
indigenous races. After the hotel will come the bank, and then the
church and school, and before long the whole will grow into a village
or town, of which the United States will take possession by law. As for
the original squatters, they will make over their log cabins and their
bits of cultivation to new arrivals, of more sedentary tastes than
their own, and will move on further, with their wives and children, to
make a fresh settlement, often exchanging rifle shots with the Redskins
the while, in some spot where they can find that absolute independence
which they prize above all other goods. Thus does the tide of
civilisation, which shall soon cover the whole American continent, move
ceaselessly onward.

But on our own particular road we had got no further than the
squatters, and of them, after the day's march was over, we asked a
hospitality which was always cordially granted.

They were an energetic and a singular race. Here you might come on a
pupil from West Point (the military and polytechnic school of the
United States), a former captain in the army, who had married an Indian
wife, and had to learn French to make himself understood by her and the
other Indians in the neighbourhood, who could speak no other language.
A whole family of little half-breeds, more red than white, swarmed
about him. There again, both father and mother would be white-skinned,
witn splendid children, whom the mother rocked to sleep in the
intervals of preparing an excellent dinner for us with a haunch of
venison we had bought from an Indian who had just killed a buck. Their
log cabin, like all the others, indeed, consisted of one large room
below, with a big fireplace on which perfect tree trunks were burning,
and a loft above it. In these lofts passing travellers like ourselves
slept. And they were not over warm, for the doors and windows only
fitted tolerably, and the weather was frosty. In the evening the sons
of the house--huge fellows who crushed your hand when they shook it,
and who used their axes as well as they used their guns--would come in
from work, and the evenings would be spent sitting smoking and talking
round the fire.

"There are a great many Indians still," I was told, "and they are
rather turbulent; they killed a white man quite lately. The squatters
are very far apart too. But then we haven't to bother our heads or put
ourselves out because of anybody."

At one place, called Fond du Lac, the house was somewhat less primitive
than at our previous halting-places. Our host was a doctor of
cultivated mind, living alone with his family, of whom two, girls, were
very pretty. They made us a cranberry tart, on the memory of which my
grateful palate lingers yet. The worthy doctor was armed to the teeth,
for he had no white neighbours, and over two hundred Indians, so he
told me, prowling around him. He lent me a gun, with which I went out
shooting, and as a matter of fact I did meet a considerable number of
Redskins. As long as they can find game, and here it was plentiful,
they are, as a rule, tolerably inoffensive. Yet these were the remnant
of warlike tribes which had never been thoroughly subjugated, and there
was a hill, not very far off, called "Deadman's Butts," in memory of a
fight waged between them and the French army, backed by three thousand
Chippewa Indians, which ended in a terrible massacre. Notwithstanding
the presence of such neighbours, my host had chosen the spot where he
had pitched his tent right well, for I saw on a map of Wisconsin, which
I chanced to look at many years later, that Fond du Lac had become a
town, with railways running to and from it.

Leaving Fond du Lac, we found ourselves on the prairie, stretching wide
as far as the eye could see; dry yellowish grass (it was the end of
October) covered the slightly undulating plain, with here and there a
scanty clump of trees. It constitutes the plateau (not a very high one)
which separates the Mississippi river system from that of the St.
Lawrence. Our horses cantered gaily over the frozen ground. All at once
we saw a big animal running away from us at a kind of amble. We urged
forward our mounts in pursuit, and got up just in time to see it enter
a clump of brushwood, not fifty paces across. An Indian, who acted as
our guide, went into the thicket after it, gun in hand. A dreadful
roar, which terrified our horses, was followed by the appearance of the
infuriated animal. It was a puma, or panther without spots, which
galloped in a circle round M. de Montholon's horse, and then retreated
into a larger clump of trees, where we thought it prudent to leave it,
as our only arm was a single-barrelled small-bore rifle. Somewhat
further on we saw a big cloud gather on the horizon and rapidly
approach us. The prairie was on fire. We then took the well-known plan
of setting it on fire ourselves just where we were. Within less than
five minutes our fire had run a mile before the wind, going as fast as
a horse can gallop, with a noise like a distant rattle of musketry. We
and our horses entered the space we had set on fire ourselves, while
the big conflagration in the distance, finding no food in front, fled
away to our right and left. I afterwards saw the same sight at night.
It was most beautiful.

As we neared the Mississippi we got into less wild country. I remember
the first hotel where the host said to me, "You have come just in good
time. You'll have something out of the common for dinner. We have been
killing a sheep." Since leaving Green Bay we had been living
exclusively on venison and prairie hens and wild duck. A sheep was a
great rarity. We came upon the Mississippi at Galena in Illinois, so
called on account of its lead mines. When I say mines, I use an
expression which was quite inappropriate at the time of my visit, for
the galena, or lead-ore, lay on the surface of the soil. You saw its
metallic brightness shining out everywhere, and so rich was the ore,
that it yielded seventy-five per cent. of lead, even under the most
summary of processes. Added to this fact, the expense of transport
being infinitesimal, as the huge artery of the Mississippi River ran a
few paces from the beds, the working of them was so profitable that
nobody took the trouble to extract the silver from it. But the result
of this mineral wealth was that everything one eat and drank at Galena
was impregnated with lead, so much so, indeed, that one of my
companions had a fainting fit, caused by the sediment which the eau de
Botot he used for his toilet deposited in his glass. He thought he had
been poisoned. I had not time, when I got to the Mississippi, to go
down it to New Orleans, like our soldiers and explorers, when they made
their first journey across this splendid country, and by it united a
French Canada with a French Louisiana. The journey I had just taken had
lasted longer than I had thought for, and as my duty as a sailor
recalled me imperiously to my ship, my only thought was to rejoin her
as soon as possible. But means of communication in the West were few
and far between--railroads were unknown, roads hardly laid out. We were
fain to go down the Mississippi to where the Ohio falls into it, go up
that river to Cincinnati, and thence get by mail-coach to the railroads
in the older Atlantic States. This return journey was not altogether
uneventful. Our boat, ran aground several times during the descent of
the Upper Mississippi. On one of these occasions we were delayed for
some time near the confluence of that stream with the DesMoines River,
flowing through an exquisite country called Iowa, which in those days
had not yet been annexed by the Union. It swarmed with game. I remember
one shooting expedition I made with the ship's engineer, a young
Kentuckian of colossal stature. We flushed thousands of prairie hens
and other creatures, on whom we poured a hot but harmless fire. In our
own justification I must add that the Kentuckian was shooting with a
bullet, using a huge carbine, so heavy that it took him half a minute
to aim with it, and I with a single-barrelled gun, lent me by a
bar-keeper, with this information, "The barrel is all twisted. You must
aim three or four yards to the right, if you want to hit anything!"

The territory of Iowa was still disputed for by squatters and Indians.
These latter, who exceeded the whites in number, belonged to a great
tribe, both turbulent and warlike, the Saxes and the Foxes. They were
at peace with the Government at the time I speak of, but a deputation
of their chiefs, numbering thirty or forty, came on board our boat, on
their way to Washington, where they desired to lay their grievances
before the President. They arrived on board in full war paint, their
faces painted half red and half yellow, and their heads dressed, like a
cuirassier's helmet, with horsehair and big feathers, their bodies
naked, but hung about with baubles, their legs thrust into leather
breeches, and big blankets over all. Their squaws were with them. They
were ugly, but the men were splendid, with the most resolute and
impassive countenances. They behaved with the greatest dignity while on
board, and never showed any excitement except just as we were passing
by the confluence of the Missouri with the Mississippi. Whether it was
some superstitious feeling that attached itself to that spot, or the
impression made on them by the grandeur of the scene, the meeting of
the two great rivers forming a sort of lake, lighted up by a splendid
sunset, I know not, but they all assembled in the stern of the boat,
and repeated a sort of invocatory prayer. It was a perfect picture.

I did no more than pass through St. Louis, already a large town and the
capital of Ohio. An accident happened to us as we were going up the
Ohio ("La Belle Riviere" of our forefathers), such as does not occur
nowadays, when the Federal Government has caused the engineer
regiments, which add to their other functions those of our "ponts et
chaussees," a simple and economical plan, worthy of general imitation,
to clear the rivers of their different obstructions. We were snagged.

Herewith I explain the expression and the fact. As a consequence of
inundations and falling in of banks and such like, many big trees had,
from time immemorial, been carried down the American rivers. Many of
these trees had ended by catching in the river beds by their roots.
Stripped of their branches, and sharpened to a point by the action of
the water, and bent sloping by the current, they formed, as it were,
huge invisible subaqueous chevaux de frise, on which steamers going up
stream frequently impaled themselves, and this often to the destruction
of the ship and great loss of life. We ran against one of these trees,
somewhat sideways luckily for us, but it stood up on end, and amid a
frightful noise, and a little momentary consternation, carried away one
paddle box and wheel. A snag is only one of the numerous sources of
accident in American river navigation. But one soon gets accustomed to
the carelessness of danger which characterises the Americans, and on
the whole travelling on their river steamers is very pleasant. The
sleeping cabins are invariably clean and comfortable. On certain boats
some are very elegant. I have seen wedding cabins, that is to say
cabins decorated all over with mirrors and brilliantly lighted up,
intended for couples on their wedding journey. And truth compels me to
state that the strict regularity of these honeymoon couples is not too
severely inquired into.

At Cincinnati, the city of porkers, I took to the stage, at Pittsburg
to the canal. Across the Alleghanies I travelled in a coach crammed
with passengers of both sexes. It was a merry journey, during which I
was ceaselessly haunted by memories of the little Danaids, and Pere
Lournois and his forty sons-in-law, getting out of the Auxerre coach to
the sound of the chimes of Dunkirk. "Tutu ... tutu ... mon pere." At
New York I found the Belle-Poule done up as good as new, thanks to the
excellent care of my second in command, M. Charner. But before setting
sail I had to get through a certain number of banquets, followed by
toasts, and even to go to Boston for a great ball in the old town hall,
called the Faneuil Hall, the cradle of American Independence. I made my
entry at that ball preceded and surrounded by an army of solemn
stewards, wearing huge wigs, and with rather a good-looking woman, whom
nobody knew, on my arm. She called herself America Vespuccia, and she
began to swear like any heathen when somebody spilt a glass of lemonade
over her fine velvet gown.

The Belle-Poule weighed anchor at last, but before we got past Sandy
Hook a snowstorm came on. We could not see a yard ahead, and in a few
minutes we had a foot of snow on deck. The rest of our return voyage
was to match, in other words, it was awful. We ran, during its course,
one of those totally unforeseen risks of which a sailor's life is full,
and which, once past, constitutes one of its chief charms. Let my
readers try the following experiment:--Put two small bits of paper in a
basin of water, and disturb the liquid. By what learned men call
capillary attraction the two scraps of paper draw nearer to each other
and finally join together. It was this same capillary attraction which
nearly lost me my frigate and another battleship, the Cassard, which
was our consort. A violent south-easterly squall had come down on us,
and the sea was very heavy. All at once, just as night fell, over a sky
as black as ink and an angry-looking sea, the wind suddenly dropped.
The Cassard, driven by the last puff of wind, and drawn too by
capillary attraction, had got very near us, and soon this nearness
became alarming. We could not get about, for there was not a breath
stirring. We could not launch boats in such a sea to try and tow the
ships apart. Soon the frigate and her consort were tossing convulsively
in the heavy sea, with only the breadth of one wave between them. In
another moment they must crash into each other, and that at night, in
mid-ocean, far from any succour. It was a solemn moment. Although one
watch had been sent to turn in, nobody had cared to stay below. All
were on deck, men and officers alike, with serious faces. The only
sound to be heard was the noise of the sails flapping wildly against
the masts and my voice as I gave the other ship's captain his orders in
case a puff of wind should come from this quarter or that. Night had
come on, and in our heart of hearts we were both of us beginning to
despair, when the longed-for breath of wind came, and the ships drew
apart. Two hours later we were at the mercy of another gale, a
north-westerly one this time, with a bitter frost, which would not have
left a timber of the Belle-Poule and the Cassard if they had been in
collision, but which gave me occasion once more to admire our brave
sailors' courage and devotion. We had to set all sail so as to catch
the first puffs of wind. When the gale came on it became necessary to
furl them again. But having been soaked by the rain of the
south-easterly storm, they had turned under the action of the frost
into perfect icicles. They cracked like glass, cutting the men's
fingers and tearing out their nails. It was a frightfully difficult job
to take in the maintop sail--a very heavy hempen one--which I had kept
out as long as possible, and which had to be furled just when the storm
was at its worst. I watched my poor fellows clinging to the yard for
over half an hour, shaken by the terrible gusts, and still not able to
manage it.

At midnight, when the watch changed, fearing that with limbs benumbed
by the cold as theirs were, they would not be able even to continue
holding on, I sent them orders to come on deck and let fresh men take
their places. But no! they would not! and slowly, surely, they finished
their work. Only when they got down from aloft they came on to the
quarterdeck cap in hand, with bleeding, swollen hands and faces,
saying, "Captain, we have taken the maintop sail in," with that
indefinable but touching look that a man has who has done his duty to
the very end in spite of danger.

My brave sailors, I could have kissed them! But I did what they
appreciated more than that! I had good hot mulled wine ready for them,
and sent them to bed on it! Some days afterwards, in another gale,
between two snow-showers, I saw that rare electric phenomenon called
St. Elmo's fire--jets of electric fire appearing at the points of all
the ship's masts and yards. A spontaneous, unexpected, and most
effective illumination.

And then we entered Toulon harbour, where we saluted the flag of
Admiral Hugon, commanding the squadron to which the Belle-Poule was
about to be attached.

CHAPTER IX

1842

As the squadron was to go into winter quarters at Toulon, and as the
BELLE-POULE had to repair a great many damages, I went back to Paris
towards the end of January, 1842, and plunged joyfully into that most
precious of all possessions amidst the storms and vicissitudes of
politics, my home life. This notwithstanding, the pleasures of the gay
world, then a fairly brilliant one were by no means indifferent to me.
There was a numerous succession of festivities. My brother, the Duc
d'Orleans, gave a magnificent fancy ball in the Pavillon Marsan. All
the elegant and artistic world of Paris was there, dressed either in
historical costumes, faithfully copied from pictures in the museums, or
else in fantastic garments which especially set off the beauty of their
feminine wearers. Mesdames de Contades, de Murat, and Place had adopted
Eastern dress. Madame Thiers wore a rich moyen age costume; Madame de
Plaisance headed a whole quadrille of hunters and huntresses. The
Comtesse Duhesme another, in which both gentlemen and ladies wore the
charming costumes brought into fashion by Giraud's picture, La
Permission de Dix Heures. The beautiful Madame Liadieres shone in a
quadrille of light cavalry men of the time of Louis XV, and
shepherdesses dressed a la Pompadour. The foreigners and members of the