THE COUNT DE GRASSE
De Grasse himself was a man of reputation, a talented and highly trained officer, able to map out the strategy of a campaign in advance with any man of his time, as his admirably planned and executed Chesapeake campaign had just proved to all the world. He was just fifty-nine—five years younger than Rodney. Both men had followed the sea for half-a-century, the young De Grasse taking service under the Order of Malta, in which seven-and-twenty of his ancestors had been enrolled before him, just about the time that the schoolboy Rodney was leaving Harrow to enter the Royal Navy as the last of the 'King's Letter Boys.' Since then De Grasse, as an officer of the French navy in the regular line, had served all over the world, and done well for his country and himself. He had fought against England in three wars and been taken prisoner once. In the present war, indeed, he had already taken part in six fleet actions, and in three of them as chef d'escadre and third in command had had opportunity of learning something of Rodney's methods on the day of battle. Such was Joseph Paul de Grasse-Briançon, Knight of Malta, Grand Cross of the Order of St. Louis, Chevalier of the Order of Cincinnatus, Count de Grasse and Marquis de Grasse-Tilly, thirty-fifth of his line, of the noblesse of Provence, overlord of forty fiefs, the man in whose hands rested the fate of the campaign now about to open. 'Fresh from the victorious thunder of the American cannon' as he was, not a man under his orders doubted his ability to achieve success in the grand project that had been committed to his hands.
The Marquis de Vaudreuil was De Grasse's second in command. There was no better gentleman, from all accounts—never a nobler specimen of a French naval officer of the old school than Louis Philippe de Rigaud, Marquis de Vaudreuil. He looks it in his portrait at Versailles—a beau sabreur of the sea, rusé, ready-witted in emergency, a 'first-class fighting man' in all respects. The son of a sailor, the grandson of a sailor, the great-grandson of a sailor, he belonged to a family that had sent its sons to serve 'on the ships of the King' ever since France had had a navy. 'Il a de l'eau de mer autour du c[oe]ur' is an old Breton saying that applied in the case of the scions of the Norman house of De Vaudreuil. He was a year younger than De Grasse, and like his chief had once had to go through the bitter experience of having to raise his hat on the quarter-deck of a foeman's ship as he gave up his sword to a foreigner in token of surrender.[17] Like De Grasse also, De Vaudreuil had taken part in six fleet battles since the war began. He was there by his own choice. There was not a man in the fleet who had not heard how, only a little time before, De Vaudreuil had refused the King's personal offer of a lucrative colonial governorship—De Vaudreuil was a poor man—rather than be absent from what to him was the post of duty. 'I am a sailor, your Majesty,' was the fine reply, 'and in war-time a sailor's place is on the sea.'[18] No officer in the whole French navy was more personally popular than was this courtly son of old-time France—'noble de sang, d'armes, et de nom.'
The circumnavigator Bougainville, chef d'escadre, was third in command, and about to add another experience to the many he had gone through in his crowded life. Professor of mathematics, barrister, author, major of militia, diplomatist, colonel of light dragoons, A.D.C. at Quebec and on the Rhine, circumnavigator, flag-captain—there were few things within his reach that Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the clever son of a country lawyer, had not tried his hand at in his time.[19]
Of the other officers, a third almost of the Annuaire de la Noblesse, the Debrett of Versailles, was represented at Fort Royal. Among the senior officers alone there were four Marquises, two Viscounts, five Counts, six Chevaliers, two Barons, nineteen 'de's,' only two plain Messieurs. There was a second De Vaudreuil, the Vicomte's younger brother, the Comte de Vaudreuil, a man of another kind—a smart, hard-fighting officer, but better known for his feats of gallantry than for his feats of arms, in particular as the favoured first lover of that haughty young beauty Gabrielle Yolande de Polignac, daintiest of Court ladies of the hour, 'avec le visage d'un ange et'—perhaps it will be kinder to say no more. The Comte de Vaugiraud was Captain of the Fleet. Baron d'Escars, of the house of Fitz-James, notorious for his fanatical hatred of Great Britain, was captain of the Glorieux. The Sieur de la Clochetterie, an impetuous and brilliant officer—whose name as captain of the Belle Poule in her duel with the 'Saucy' Arethusa at the outset of the war, the French navy still remembers—commanded the Hercule. Comte d'Albert de Rions, by reputation the ablest tactician in the French navy, after De Suffren, was the senior captain. A De la Charette commanded the black Bourgogne;[20] a De Castellan, the Auguste; De la Vicomté, the Hector; and so on. There is, indeed, as one runs down the list of the French captains at Fort Royal, quite a ring of mediæval chivalry, of old-time romance, about their names. De Mortemart, De Monteclerc, De Saint Césaire, De Champmartin, De Castellane-Majastre, Le Gardeur de Tilly, to take half-a-dozen other names at random—one might almost be checking off one of Bayard's compagnies d'élite, or calling over a muster-roll of the Lances of Du Guesclin. In the junior ranks were a De Tourville, the Vicomte de Betisy, two scions of the historic house of St. Simon, a Grimaldi, a Lascaris, a De Lauzun, a De Sevigné, a MacMahon, a Talleyrand, a De Ségur, a De Rochefoucauld, a Montesquieu. Brueys d'Aigalliers, of a noble family of Languedoc, who later on took service under the Revolution, and perished fighting Nelson at the Nile, was one of the lieutenants. La Pérouse, the explorer, was a capitaine de frégate. Bruix and Denis Decrès, Napoleon's Ministers of Marine in later days, were two of the midshipmen. Magon, who fell a rear-admiral at Trafalgar, was an enseigne de vaisseau. L'Hermitte, Troude, Willaumez, Emeriau, Bourayne, others of Napoleon's admirals, were among the boy volontiers d'honneur (naval cadets) in various ships of the Fort Royal fleet. De Grasse's personal staff comprised the Vicomte de Grasse, the admiral's nephew, the Comte de Cibon, and the Marquis de Beaulieu.
It was a glittering and gallant crowd that walked the quarter-deck with all the gay abandon of their race those balmy, fragrant West Indian evenings of April 1782, while the band played 'Vive Henri Quatre!' and 'Charmante Gabrielle,' high spirited, and heedless of the coming days. What were they not going to do, 'pour en finir avec ces Anglais—bêtes!' Jamaica first, cela s'entend! Then the sack of Barbados,—the spoil of the goldsmiths and silversmiths of Bridgetown and the mansions of the planters, whose sideboards, groaning under the weight of gold and silver plate, 'astonished and stirred the envy of every passing visitor,' as travellers had told ever since the time of old Père Labat, 'gold and silver plate so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost of an expedition for the reduction of the island!' Vive la France! Vive la Gloire! Light-hearted and gay, how many of them gave a thought to something else? What of those who would not live to see the coming battle through? How many of them all would kneel next Sunday three weeks to receive the aumônier's blessing at early mass? Ah well!—what mattered it!—Fortune de guerre! Perhaps so. Perhaps, indeed, better so—at any rate, for some of them. Those who were to fall in the coming fight were to be envied, rather, in their ending. It was better, surely, to go down there and then, to be dropped overboard in the clear, deep water alongside, eight hundred and fifty fathoms down, to sleep the last sleep beneath the lapping wavelets of the blue Caribbean, dead on the field of honour, than to survive for what was yet to come for France, to experience the fate that was to befall so many a gallant French officer who outlived the cannon thunders of Rodney's day. To be laid to rest there in those soft summer seas was at least a better fortune than to have to undergo the cruel doom that a few years later overtook so many of their messmates who outlasted the fight. Better be smashed in two by an English cannon-ball on the quarter-deck, than perish hideously in the dungeons of Draguignan, or go in the tumbrils to a death of ignominy and cold-blooded horror, clattering over the cobble-stones to the Place de Grève, while all round the mob of Paris howled and danced and cursed—the hapless lot of so many a gallant naval officer among the rest of the gentlemen of old-time France,
... those gallant fellows who died by guillotine,
For honour and the fleur-de-lis and Antoinette the Queen.