A sudden change came over my life at Rio de Janeiro, one which my parents had long desired. I married. My bride was the second daughter of the Emperor Dom Pedro, Princess Francoise, whose acquaintance I had made some six years previously, during my first visit to Brazil. The official request for the princess's hand was made in the King's name by the Baron de Langsdorff, who was sent over as ambassador extraordinary for that purpose in the Ville de Marseilles. The wedding was celebrated at the San Cristofero Palace, and a few days afterwards we started for Brest, which place we reached after a slow passage of seventy-two days against contrary winds.

On my arrival I had to give up the command of the Belle-Poule, and I did not part from the old ship, which had carried me so well and safely through so many adventures, without a pang of emotion. I felt, when I clasped my officers' hands in hearty farewell, that I was sure (THEN, at least) of meeting them again in the course of my professional career. The painful leave-taking was when I had to say good-bye to my brave crew, a happy family, in which discipline had been so strictly established from the very outset of the voyage, that punishment had become unknown, and whose universal sense of duty had engendered that mutual affection between officers and men which is the foundation of true professional zeal and self-sacrifice.

The fine body of fighting men which four years of care and unvaryingly consistent management had brought to the highest pitch of perfection, all the brave fellows of whom I felt I could ask anything and be certain it would be performed, were to be scattered, every man to his own home. I was never to see them again, except a few, one here and one there. Nowadays even, after the lapse of fifty years, if chance takes me anywhere upon the seacoast, I sometimes see some old sailor's eye fixed on me, altered as I am, as though he were searching the far depths of his memory. All at once one hand goes up to his cap, and the other is stretched out to me with a friendly look, and the words "Do you remember such a one, topman of the maintop—such a storm—such an escape?"

Then my heart swells, and I say to myself, as I could go on saying for ever, "There is nothing you cannot do with Frenchmen when they are once saturated with the spirit of obedience, discipline, and duty!"

CHAPTER XI

1844

I had hardly got back to Paris when I was shot on to the Admiralty Board. A great honour it was, no doubt, for a junior like myself to be associated with such veterans in the profession as numbers among its members were. But this gathering of experienced men was merely a body of advisers placed at the disposal of the Minister of Marine, to assist him with its counsel on any questions he chose to submit to them. The committee possessed no initiative of its own, and I felt myself misplaced upon it. I had indeed, and always have preserved, the deepest respect for its eminent qualities. It has contributed not a little, by its consistent action and permanent character, to the preservation of our naval organisation—the worth of which has been proved everywhere, in the Crimea, on the battlefields in 1870, in Tunis, and in China—from the results of the conceited ignorance of mushroom politicians. But in the year 1843 we were on the brink of the inevitable revolution worked in naval matters by the introduction of steam. The great object for us was to create, and that rapidly, under pain of being outstripped by others, a new naval force, more appropriate, perhaps, than our former one, to our national genius and resources. Passionately interested as I was in the greatness of my country, having leisure time to dispose of, since nothing called on me to plunge into the paltry bargain-making of electoral politics in which that country was wallowing, having no love of red tape nor excess of experience to hold me back, I was ardently anxious to be employed where I could actively assist in creating a powerful element in the national strength. I therefore merely passed through the Admiralty Board.

My only recollection of it is of having been present at some very long sittings in a room in the Ministry of Marine, the windows of which look on to the Rue Royale, which apartment one of my colleagues, Admiral de Bougainville, had turned into a sort of stovehouse by means of hot-air pipes, sandbags, screens, and foot muffs. We all nearly died of the heat, and when another colleague of mine, Baron Charles Dupin, made us long speeches, I had the greatest difficulty in keeping myself awake.

The Minister of Marine decided, at my entreaty, to appoint a special naval commission on steam, of which I was a member. The chief commission did nothing, or scarcely anything—but a sub-commission did good work. There were five of us—a captain in the navy, M. de Verninac (who was afterwards Minister of Marine under General Cavaignac); a very clever engineer, formerly Superintendent at Indret, M. Rossin; an artillery colonel, M. Durbec; M. Touchard, a naval lieutenant; and myself. I will not give the full story of our work, and of the constant battle we had to fight with obstinate habit and dread of responsibility. All those early attempts of ours at transforming our navy seem almost childish, looked at from the distance of the half-century which has since elapsed. And indeed, though my recollection of them is clear enough, I have no means of verifying it, all my notes and reports, and all my correspondence relating to the undertakings in question, having passed out of my hands, in the following manner:—

Some months after the Revolution in 1848, while I was residing in England, at Claremont, a visitor's name was brought up to me. The name, de X., was that of a good family, well known in Normandy and in the political and scientific world. But instead of one of the faces I was prepared to see, I beheld that of a most unsatisfactory member of the family, whom I instantly remembered having seen in Algeria, wearing a Belgian uniform, and acting as reporter for the Constitutionnel newspaper. He entered the room and said: