"A nice sort of amusement, indeed! I used to hunt once upon a time, to please my father! You get fifty horsemen together. Everybody is got up in the smartest style. First of all there is a general kicking of horses all round. All at once somebody shouts 'Found!' and in one minute every soul is covered with mud from head to foot. You tear along as hard as your horse can go for two hours without seeing a single thing. Then there is another whoop, and every soul goes home completely knocked up—a very fine amusement indeed!"
We left the King to his little sticks, we killed our boar, and we were on our way home, when, as we were going down the hill from Franchard, a Hussar officer came galloping up to us, and called out:
"The King has been fired at. He's not hit."
If Providence ever watched over a man it did so that day. The would-be assassin, Lecomte, a royal forester who had resigned his place, angry because he had not been given the capital sum producing his pension, instead of the pension itself, of which he was in receipt, and overexcited as well by the calumny, abuse, attacks, and threats of all kinds with which the daily press overwhelmed the King, had determined to kill his Majesty.
He was an excellent shot, and he went and built himself a platform behind the wall of the Parquet d'Avon, by which he knew the King's char a banes must pass. When the carriage went by, at a slow trot, ten paces from his ambush, he rested his rifle on the wall, and fired. But at the very instant of the crime his hand must have trembled, for nobody was touched, neither the orderly officer on duty, Captain Brahaut, who was riding between the King and the wall, nor Montalivet, who was sitting talking to my father, on the front seat of the carriage, nor my mother, the Duchesse de Nemours, my aunt Adelaide, and the Prince and Princess of Salerno, who were on the other seats. All the bullet did was to cut the fringe of a sort of awning, which covered the carriage, just above the King's head.
At the sound of the shot, the intended effect of which nobody mistook, the two orderly officers, Brahaut and de Labadie, followed by Colonel Berryer, and several Hussar officers who were in attendance on the royal party, dashed off at a gallop to surround the enclosure, before Lecomte could escape from it. At the same moment, one of the grooms named Millet, who had brought his horse up against the wall, and stood up on his saddle, saw the assassin making off. He sprang boldly after him, and had a fearful struggle with him till the officers came up to his assistance.
When I got back to my father and the Princesses, I found them much distressed at this fresh attempt at regicide, but calm and self-possessed to an extent which was far from being my own case. So true is it that our sharpest anxieties are caused by the suffering, and dangers of those we love!
About this period I was restored to active duty, being called to command our evolutionary squadron in the Mediterranean. During the two years' duration of this command, I only had to follow in the footsteps of my predecessors, so far as the organisation and instruction of the ships' crews were concerned, and the maintenance of that spirit of discipline, devotion, and obedience to superiors which still constitutes their chief excellence.
But a new duty was cast upon me by the addition, now made for the first time, of a certain number of steamships to the squadron. I had sailed already with several squadrons. Whatever the number of ships composing them, the manoeuvring of the vessels and their tactics, both in sailing and in action, all depended on one and the same element for all alike—viz., the strength and direction of the wind And these tactics, which were the result of centuries of experience, we all of us had put into practice, and we had them at the tips of our fingers. We knew them as well as our catechism, in fact. But this new art of simultaneously navigating ships for whom the laws of wind did not exist, and which could move in any direction, and with great swiftness, according to the will and fancy of their captains, without allowing them to collide, was in its earliest infancy.
My duty then was to make experiments, so as to begin to regulate this new form of navigation. At once I set about making numerous test manoeuvres, drawing on the tactics of the ancient galleys, and also on cavalry movements, at the slow march and at the gallop, for my inspiration. Then we tried towing in every form. First of all we harnessed a steamboat to every two warships. In the second year of my command each floating citadel had her own "spare horse." From that time out calms and light breezes were vanquished, and the celerity of naval operations correspondingly increased. Yet, the more we tried it, the more obviously did the dangers and difficulties caused, especially at night, by fastening two ships together, one of whom is necessarily a passive agent, stare us in the face. The union of the tug and the "towed" was not far distant. The advent of the war steamer, the swift battleship, independent alike of wind and sea, was close at hand.