"Do you remember me?"
"Perfectly."
"Well, I've just arrived from your part of the world."
"What do you mean?"
"After the Tuileries were captured, on February 24th (you were in Algiers just then), I took up my quarters in your rooms. They are very comfortable rooms. I stayed in them for two months. They were rather upside down, as you may fancy. Everything worth taking had been carried off, but the floor was littered with books and papers and a whole heap of things that everybody had trodden upon. I amused myself by settling them all up, especially your letters and papers, which I sorted. I arranged them into several classes. Everything referring to your missions and to political matters I sent to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and everything touching the navy to the Ministry of Marine. In fact, I disposed of everything. But I put aside a few documents regarding the Princesse de Joinville's business matters in Brazil and your own private journals of your sea-voyages, and brought them with me here."
He smilingly showed me a packet he held in his hand, then went on:
"But my journey has cost me a lot of money." "Then say how much you want, in plain English."
"A hundred louis."
I went and fetched the money, and then showed him the door without another word, though I could hardly resist kicking him through it. Thus it was that I learnt what had become of my papers on naval subjects. I greatly regretted the loss of my private correspondence, and more especially that of my letters from M. Dupuy de Lome, a most talented young engineer, much in advance of his times, with whom I had been in daily intercourse.
Our commission did its best. It made a modest beginning by altering the fighting armament of our existing ships, placing their guns fore and aft, so as to permit of their developing their artillery power to the utmost possible extent, while at the same time exposing the propelling machinery to as little danger as possible. We turned out ships of various types, such as the Descartes, the Cuvier, the Pluton, &c. Then came the turn of the fabric of the ships themselves, and we had a series of experiments made on the practising ground at Gavres, near Lorient, to test the penetration of projectiles on every sort of substance—wood, coal, gutta-percha, iron plates, and finally on iron plates superimposed one on the other—in other words armour-plating. It was ten years before the armour plating was actually brought into use, so great was the delay caused by political agitation in the country.