Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince de Joinville Part 16

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 a.s.sa.s.sin, 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 pa.s.s. 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 n.o.body 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 d.u.c.h.esse 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sa.s.sin making off. He sprang boldly after him, and had a fearful struggle with him till the officers came up to his a.s.sistance.

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 const.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sive 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.

The creation of such a ship had preoccupied M. Dupuy de Lome for a long time past. He had gone to England to see and study everything there--both in the State dockyards and the building yards at Liverpool and on the Clyde. We had often talked the whole thing over together, and our views on the subject were in perfect agreement. At last, during an interval of leave from my command, he came to me one morning with a great roll containing two complete designs under his arm. The first for an armed frigate, BUILT ENTIRELY OF IRON, the second for a wooden line of battle ship--both to be exceedingly swift. The first design, for the iron frigate, was Dupuy de Lome's pet scheme.

"Iron-built ships will be the ships of the future," he used to say, and he was quite right.

But the experiments we had been making at Lorient upon iron plates had been disastrous. The damage done by oblique firing on them was terrible. Experiments were indeed being made at the same time, with a view to armour-plating the hulls of ships, but all that was still in the dimmest and mistiest future. How were we ever to induce naval committees, as timid as they were, undoubtedly, all powerful, to a.s.sent to the building of a steam frigate every single detail about which was to be new and improved?

"The very utmost we shall get," said I to Dupuy, "will be leave to build your wooden ship. The introduction of the submerged steam propeller will be their concession to the innovators, and the old-fashioned wooden hull and spars and gundecks will satisfy the supporters of the old traditions."

"Very well," he replied, "I'll go and propose my wooden ship."

He did, and he failed. They gave him plenty of smooth words and compliments, but refused to order his ship to be put on the stocks. The poor fellow came back to me in despair, and we were mingling our sorrows, and casting about as to how we had better return to the charge, when a lucky ministerial crisis threw the Ministry for Naval Affairs, ad interim, into the hands of M. Guizot. There we saw our chance.

I want to see him and told him all our story--explaining to him how a real and material step in naval progress was being adjourned on mere questions of form; and how the outgoing minister had not dared, in spite of his own good-will, to shake himself free of administrative procrastination in this particular.

M. Guizot heard me out, and then asked me what had better be done.

"Why, simply take your own line, and the whole navy will applaud you.

You have full right to do it, so pray sign an order to put a steamship after M. Dupuy de Lome's designs on the stocks."

He did it, forthwith, and that step gained, our first war steamer was at once begun. Though Dupuy had a right to all the honours of paternity, I might have claimed those of the ship's G.o.dfather. But she was still unnamed when the Revolution of 1848 broke out, and christened her le 24 Fevner, which name was swiftly exchanged for that of Napoleon--a notion that makes me laugh even yet.

I must now return to my personal recollections of my command, which began, as usual, with a sojourn at the Salins d'Hyeres, to knock the crews into shape a bit. Thence I was expected to take the squadron to Tunis, thus following the usual custom.

These two anchorages, Hyeres and Tunis, had been for a considerable period the only ports in which the squadron was allowed to lie. It oscillated between the two; a most tiresome bit of navigation it was.

In the open roads at Tunis, too, we could only lie and roll, a long way from sh.o.r.e, with no possibility of giving our crews any relaxation whatsoever. I do not hesitate to say that I objected to being tied to this rigorously circ.u.mscribed field of operations, beyond which it looked as if we dared not go.

"Crews," said I to the minister, "are like schoolboys. If you want them to work well you must divert their minds, and give them something to think about and look at. Give me leave to fight ennui, and the despondency it brings with it, by taking the squadron about, showing fresh ground to my young fellows, and taking them into ports where I shall be able to send them ash.o.r.e to amuse themselves, and thus break the enervating monotony of life on board ship."

I gained my point, and we went first of all to the Golfe Jouan. Will it be believed that our squadrons never went near that excellent anchorage and lovely spot? They used to be at the Islands of Hyeres. They used to go out to drill in the open sea, and every Sat.u.r.day they went straight back to those same islands, so as to let the married men in the squadron get back to Toulon to their family duties on the Sunday. I was the first admiral to break through this rule.

The Golfe Jouan and Cannes, and all that lovely country, were not at that time what they now are. There was only one single villa at Cannes, the Villa Eleonore, built by Lord Brougham, the Christopher Columbus of the locality. He always came to the Tuileries on his way backwards and forwards between his villa and England; and he invariably sang the praises of that exquisite coast to us. One evening he made a sketch of his villa for my mother, which I still possess.

The only gaieties at Cannes in those days consisted in village festivals, which are known in Provence as Romerages, the equivalent of the Pardons in Brittany. People went to them on foot, there not being a carriage in the country I remember I went to the Romerage at Valauris.

The little Provencales in their short petticoats and brown stockings, and their broad-brimmed black hats, enjoyed themselves to their hearts'

content in the shade to the sound of the galoubet, while my eyes wandered between the umbrella pines across the wide sea horizon, of that lapis-blue peculiar to the Mediterranean. It was more primitive then than it is nowadays, but not a whit less lovely.

From Cannes we were obliged to go to Tunis, but we put in, on our way, at the Balearic Islands, and at Palma in Majorca, where the Spanish authorities gave us an excellent reception, and granted me permission, with the best of grace, to practise some very interesting disembarkation drill. The captain-general who authorised me to do this bore the name of Tacon, and had received the t.i.tle of Duqtie de la Union de Cuba in recognition of the services he had rendered as governor-general in that island.

He was a very superior man, under whose most enlightened, but at the same time most absolute, of governments, the colony rose to the highest degree of prosperity. Some difficulties with the Home Government had led to his recall, and he was at Majorca in a state of semi-disgrace.

No longer a young man, he wore a wig of the deepest black, which, so local tradition affirmed, was made out of the hair of a lady friend whom he had had shaved in a fit of jealousy.

The King of Aragon, Don Jaime, is buried in the fine cathedral of Palma His body rests in the sacristy, in the drawer of a kind of press, in which I saw it lying, while one of the canons, to impress me with a sense of its perfect preservation, drummed with his fingers on the stomach of the corpse!

On our way to the Balearic Islands we fulfilled a pious duty. After the unhappy capitulation of Baylen and its shameful violation, our unfortunate soldiers, victims of this piece of weakness and disloyalty, were cast upon an island called Cabrera, a bare and desert spot, where most of them died of hunger, abandoned and forgotten by the whole world. Having heard that their bones were lying scattered about unburied on the isle, I had them laid in consecrated soil, and over them, through the agency of our consul, M. Cabarrus, we raised a monument, subscribed for by the whole squadron, with this inscription:

TO THE MEMORY OF THE FRENCH SOLDIERS WHO DIED AT CABRERA.

ERECTED BY THE EVOLUTIONARY SQUADRON, 1847.

We made a short stay at the inevitable Tunis, and left it under a shower of presents, from the Order of the Nicham in diamonds to six thousand dozens of eggs. But the shortness in duration of our visit was new, and requires some explanation.

One of our first cares, after the completion of our conquest of Algeria, had been to insure tranquillity on its Moorish frontier to the west, and its Tunisian boundary on the east. On the Morocco side we had been forced to have recourse to heavy ordnance for this purpose. On the Tunisian frontier, where the population is both less fanatical and less warlike, we had followed a different course of procedure. We had gained the Bey's friendship by promising to support his power against the Forte's claim to suzerainty over him. Still, year after year the Sultan made as though he were fitting out a naval force to send to Tripoli and exercise this same suzerainty by deposing the Bey; and every year our squadron used to proceed to Tunis, and stay there wasting its time while the Turkish ministry and those diplomats who were hostile to our influence amused themselves by waving the Capitan Pasha's attack before us like a scarecrow.

This annual repet.i.tion of a sham attack by the Turkish fleet and of the sudden despatch of our squadron, and its subsequent spell of idleness in Tunisian waters, had degenerated into a farce in which the ridiculous part fell to our share. So that when I took over the command of the squadron, with the prospect of seeing it undergo the same course of humbug again, I could not resist making some representations on the subject to M. Guizot, a resolute and large-minded man, as solicitous for his country's honour as for his own. That very year, as it happened, the Bey of Tunis had had to complain of intrigues and disturbances stirred up on his eastern frontier by the Turkish pasha, who was governor of Tripoli.

"Instead of leaving the squadron to dance attendance at Tunis," I said to M. Guizot, "send it to Tripoli. Its appearance will cause surprise, for foreign powers never send their squadrons there. I will pay a visit to the pasha, and speak to him very plainly. The characters in the play will change hands, and I fancy we shall be rid of all this Turko-Diplomatic teasing about Tunis for the future."

M. Guizot approved my view. I was given secret orders to go to Tripoli, and we left Tunis, to the delight of the whole squadron.

Long before the coast of Tripoli is in sight, its whereabouts is denoted by the gloomy red reflection it casts upon the sky. Soon a few clumps of date-palms seem to rise out of the water, and at last a dreary strip of land appears, the uniform straightness of which is broken only by the ma.s.s of white houses and terraces, the minarets and fortifications, of the town of Tripoli. A few reefs form a far from safe anchorage, fit for small craft only, and remarkable for the extraordinary clearness of the water in it. The smallest details of submarine life are easily followed in a depth of ten to twelve fathoms.

Our ships, which all drew a great deal of water, had to anchor at sea, opposite the town, tossed about on the swell from a storm somewhere to the north, which did not actually reach them. Our sudden, unexpected, and very unusual apparition made a certain sensation both at the consulates and in the pasha's palace, and all sorts of people hastened on board, very civil all of them, but also very anxious to know the meaning of the visit of a complete naval squadron. The pasha's deputy presented himself with a flood of the honeyed expressions demanded by Oriental politeness, accompanied by the cla.s.sical diffa. He did not bring us six thousand dozens of eggs, like the Tunis people; indeed they would have been hard to get, I think, in that little favoured spot, but he brought a very respectable contingent of cackling hens and of very sea-sick sheep. Our acceptance of these creatures, an earnest of our pacific intentions, gave him evident satisfaction, and I caused him to be told that I should ask for an interview with his master, through our consul.

I set forth, as soon as the said interview had been arranged, with a large number of officers. The streets through which we had to pa.s.s were narrow, dirty, and wretched-looking, and did not give one at all the idea of belonging to a town enriched by the commerce of Fezzan and of Central Africa, of which commerce Tripoli is the chief emporium. They were crowded, as we pa.s.sed along, by curious lookers on, consisting princ.i.p.ally of the three thousand idlers who formed the garrison, Albanian Arnauts most of them, splendid fellows, blue-eyed, with long fair moustaches, dressed in the fustanella and the rest of the picturesque palikare costume. I will not go so far as to say the glances they cast at us were absolutely friendly, but they were perfectly well behaved.

We climbed up numerous staircases to the pasha's house or Konak, and were shown into a huge apartment that was almostlike the open air, with large windows looking on the sea, which admitted a cool refreshing breeze. The pasha made me sit down beside him on a wide divan, and after the usual interchange of compliments, pipes, coffee, and preserves were ceremoniously handed round by numerous servants.

These preliminaries over, I desired the dragoman to request the pasha's earnest attention to what I was about to say to him. Immediately there was a general silence, all our officers, who filled one half of the room, and all the Turkish officers and secretaries, who filled the other half, p.r.i.c.ked up their ears. My speech was very short.

We had come to Tripoli, I said, to salute the representative of our ancient ally, the Sultan of Turkey. But it was ESSENTIAL, if this friendship was to be undisturbed, that no act of hostility, direct or indirect, should be committed against the Bey of Tunis, who was also our ally, and that nothing should occur on either side to compromise friendly relations. We had just been impressing this fact at Tunis, and had come to clo the same thing at Tripoli. The perfectly amicable nature of our visit proved the value we set on maintaining friendly relations between the two Regencies, and therefore between France and the Sultan's Government.

I said no more. When I ceased speaking, the pasha, who, I need scarcely say, had preserved the most Oriental imperturbability of countenance during my oration, bowed to me, with his hand on his breast, looking fixedly at me the while. He had understood me; and I thought I saw a look of relief flash across his face. It may be that his conscience had made him fear worse things. He sent a vessel to Malta with despatches for Constantinople. I gave an account of my proceedings to M. Guizot, and also informed our amba.s.sador to the Porte, M. de Bourqueney; but we never had to do sentry duty at Tunis again.

I put to sea at once with the squadron. The tiresome thing about our visit to Tripoli was the quarantine it entailed on us when we got back to civilised coasts. With the object of utilising the period of our enforced sequestration, I requested the governor of Malta to put health officers on board us, and to allow me to count the ten days I proposed spending under their surveillance, cruising about within sight of the island, as quarantine.

This arrangement was accepted by the English authorities, with their usual friendliness and practical good sense. The ten days were spent in drill and manoeuvres of all sorts; and then the squadron went to seek relaxation on the coasts of Sicily and Naples.

We made most agreeable stays in the ports of Syracuse, Augusta, and Messina, before going to Naples. I took advantage of them to gratify my pa.s.sion for mountaineering, and made the ascent of Etna, to the description of which by Alexandre Dumas I refer my readers.

When we reached the summit, during the night, we saw the immense crater at our feet, several thousand yards round, full of fire and smoke, out of which huge stone monoliths towered, of every shade of colour, black and green and red and yellow. Then the rising sun fell on us, leaving all the horizon around us in darkness, and when at last its light had spread everywhere, save on the giant shadow of the mountain itself, we saw all Sicily and Calabria lying at our feet like a great map, with the blue sea surrounding it on every side. It was a grand and striking spectacle.

We descended the mountain rapidly, ten yards at a jump, down the crumbly pumice slopes of the Val de Bove, to Giarre, where one of the steamers of the squadron was to take us on board; and while we waited for her we took a delicious sea bath. We swam out to meet the ship, and I was much tickled by the astonishment of the commander, enthroned upon his bridge, when he heard himself hailed out of the sea by a well-known voice, telling him to stop.