Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince de Joinville Part 4

CHAPTER IV

1837-1838

After the wedding festivities I went back to sea, a lieutenant still, on board the Hercule, 100 guns--Captain Casy. Captain, petty officers, crew, all hands in fact save a few officers, were Provencal. Before a week was out I caught myself talking with their accent!

We were bound for South America Gibraltar was our first port, and our reception by the governor, Sir Alexander Woodford, Lady Woodford, and their charming children was of the kindest. I have a recollection of it which I treasure all the more in that later in the day I had to do with another governor with whom I had no cause at all to be satisfied. From Gibraltar we went to Tangier, the Moorish town I was to bombard some years afterwards, but where on this occasion I fought with wild boars only under the guidance of that first-cla.s.s sportsman, Mr. Drummond Hay. The beauty of the eyes and colouring and the originality of the costume of the Jewish girls at Tangier delighted me, but not to the extent of chasing a certain melancholy from my heart, which had clung about it ever since the beginning of my cruise, through the long night watches, and even amidst the amus.e.m.e.nts of our stays in port. I was thinking of HER! There always is a HER when one is only twenty! After Tangier the ship stopped at Santa Cruz in Teneriffe, to take in water, and during this operation I organized a scientific expedition to the famous Peak of Teneriffe, which is nearly twelve thousand feet high, and from which my professor M. Pouillet had asked me to take some scientific observations. My brother officer, Rigaud de Genouilly, one of the ship's lieutenants, accompanied me. After two days climbing and bivouacking for one night at a great height, we were only about five or six hundred feet or so from the summit, when we were caught up by a messenger bringing us the captain's orders to get back as fast as we could. A despatch boat had just anch.o.r.ed at Santa Cruz bringing news that in consequence of some foreign complication a French squadron had been ordered to Tunis, and would probably go on to the East. The Hercule was to join it immediately. We tore down the mountain, rejoicing in the thought that we were most likely going to do some firing, and after a pa.s.sage of twenty days, spent in all sorts of fighting drill, we cast anchor in the Bay of Tunis, only to have a bucket of cold water thrown over our heads. The complications on which we had built a whole structure of danger and glory had pa.s.sed away. The squadron we were to have joined had departed, and orders awaited us to resume our interrupted cruise, and bear away for South America. One piece of news was we were told was that the expedition which was to go and avenge our last year's defeat at Constantine was fitting out at Bona, and that my brother Nemours commanded one of the brigades. Now my big ship was to revictual at Algiers, and I besought the captain, who had a free hand, to touch at Bona and give me a chance of seeing my brother. The pa.s.sage from Tunis to Bona was delayed by calms, and when we got in, I found to my great regret that the expedition had started, but that a small column was being formed which was to join it, starting on the following morning. At this news I rushed to my captain, and calling all the resources of persuasion and every wile of diplomacy to my aid, I strove to convince him that there would be time for me, during his revictualling, whereat I should be practically useless, to make a rush to the expeditionary force and get back again, and that if the King, my father, knew I had happened to be where I was, he would be much displeased at my turning my back on an enterprise which was to avenge our national honour. There were no telegraph wires in those days, and I contrived to get the desired permission. Twenty-four hours later I turned soldier for the nonce, and started off, mounted and accoutred and full of fresh dreams of glory, destined once more to disappointment--a disappointment shared by various engineer and artillery officers and three Prussians, Messieurs von Willisen, [Footnote: H. de Willisen, aide-de-camp to the Prince of Prussia, who afterwards became the Emperor William, was in chief command of the Holstein army.] von Noville, and Oelrichs, who had arrived too late to start with the expeditionary force, and, like myself, were endeavouring to rejoin it. What shall I say about the march of the column to which I was attached upon Constantine? It lasted over twelve days of fearful weather, during which no discomfort was spared us. Torrents of rain, rivers in flood, snowfalls, men dying of cold, stragglers whose shouts for help only brought us to them to find them lying headless on the ground, and last of all, a terrible outbreak of cholera, which one of the regiments in the column brought with it from France. And we had the mental agony to boot of being kept ever so long at the foot of a mountain, the Raz el Akbah, which was so sodden that no gun nor vehicle could get up it, even with triple teams, and listening to the firing of the attacking batteries before Constantine without being able to get there.

One day, during this delay, the chief medical officer, by way of consolation, greeted us with these words at breakfast: "Bad news, gentlemen; we have just discovered that the cesspools of the hospital (a miserable hut) have burst, and for the last twenty-four hours they have been leaking into the spring where we get our drinking water."

"Hang it all, doctor, you really might have kept that to yourself," we all cried in a breath!

Amid all this suffering and discomfort, physical and moral, the courage, spirits, good humour and downright gaiety of the soldiers never failed for a single moment. I had never seen them before under such trying circ.u.mstances, and I thought them quite admirable, and their officers too,--the very embodiment of devotion. One day, the rear guard detachment had dropped some way behind the main column, and found itself stopped by an impetuous torrent, which was swelling visibly under a deluge of rain. The first men who tried to cross were carried off their feet, thrown down, and only pulled out with great difficulty.

Without a moment's hesitation all the officers plunged into the water, though it was up to their arm-pits, and holding on to each other's arms they formed a sort of animated dam, above which they made their men cross over, and it was all done in the simplest way. Frenchmen of all cla.s.ses, soldiers, sailors, what-not, a splendid race they are, when the spirit of obedience and discipline inspires them with a sense of duty! At last we came in sight of Constantine, and shortly after of a body of cavalry, the Third Cha.s.seurs d'Afrique, sent out to meet us.

From an officer detached in advance we learnt the place had been taken by a.s.sault three days previously, and that the Comte de Damremont, general in command, had been cut in two by a round shot, while he was talking to my brother Nemours. Very soon, galloping up to the Coudiat-Ati, I was in the arms of that good brother, who had behaved so brilliantly during the whole campaign. He was in the act of inspecting his brave little army, and we finished the inspection together. Then he scanned me from top to toe, and the smart soldier spoke instead of the brother "You can't go about like that, haven't you anything else to put on?"

"I'm afraid I haven't," I sadly replied, with a humiliated glance at my short jacket, my trousers turned up with a bit of gutta percha, and my straw hat covered with waxed cloth, none of which had been improved by camping out in the mud. The only soldier-like things about me were my sword and my lieutenant's epaulettes. But they manufactured me a cap, a naval lieutenant, Fabre Lamaurelle, who had come up with me, lent me his coat, and so I became presentable.

The sight of the breach excited me greatly, and my first care was to mount it. If my readers will call up the appearance of the buildings pulled down when a new street is opened in Paris, they will get some idea of the picture the top of the breach presented. It was a chaos of ruins, caused by cannon shot and explosions, without any apparent way out. The ground was like the moraine of a glacier, scattered over with caps, epaulettes, and human remains. A soldier of the 2nd Light Infantry was standing sentry beside a big stone.

"What are you doing there?"

"Do you see that bit of a blue cloak down that hole? The colonel is underneath that stone, and the bayonets sticking out of the rubbish belong to the men he was leading. The explosion buried them all alive!"

A terrible trial that explosion was for a.s.saulting columns scattered through a labyrinth of ruins, and barricaded lanes, and fired at from all sides by an invisible foe.

But nothing dismayed our brave fellows for an instant. I was told that at the moment of the catastrophe, when the staff, which was following the progress of the fight with anxious ears, for there was no seeing anything, saw the cloud caused by the explosion shrouding the neighbourhood of the breach, and hundreds of wounded and burnt and maimed men coming down it, they thought the a.s.sault had been repulsed and that the game was up.

Lamoriciere, commanding the first attacking column, was carried back blinded, and to everybody's astonishment the commanding officer of the 2nd column, Colonel Combes, was seen returning also. He advanced, sword in hand, to the General commanding, over whose face an expression first of wonder and then of anger spread, at the sight of a commanding officer quitting his post. Nothing daunted, the colonel informed him, in a few curt sentences, of the state of the fight, and of his own confidence in its success, ending with these words: "It will be another glorious day for France and for those who live to see the end of it."

He saluted, tottered--he was dead! No sign of his had betrayed that he was mortally wounded.

As I listened to the tale I asked General Vallee,--"But what would you have done, General, if the a.s.sault had been repulsed?"

"We should have begun again." As he said it he pressed his lips together with that fearfully stern expression which, with his short stature, had earned him the nickname in the army of "Little Louis XI.,"

and an officer behind me who wad heard my question and the answer, added in an undertone, "And he had taken all his precautions."

"What do you mean?"

"When he was told, the night before the a.s.sault, that the ammunition was giving out, he ordered one round to be kept in reserve for the battery that played upon the breach--"

"Well?"

"Don't you understand? He meant to fire on the attacking column if it gave any sign of wavering. He did it once in Spain at the siege of Tarragona."

There was another scene of war at the opposite end of the town from the breach at the Kasbah. During the a.s.sault all the non-combatant Mussulman population had taken refuge there, crowding and cramming it up to the very edge of the ramparts that crowned the precipices of the Rummel, and either from sheer terror or by dint of the pressure of the crowd, a cascade of human beings fell from the ramparts on to the rocks and terraces of the precipice. Heaps of corpses, men, women and children, but especially women, were caught here and there, and on one of the heaps an old white-bearded Arab was turning over the dead, one by one, seeking doubtless for some one who was dear to him.

Having no official position in the army, and as I could not well rest on laurels I had not won, I spent my time sketching. I began, of course, with the breach, and installed myself, for that purpose, beside a human head severed from the trunk, which lay on the ground alongside of a dead horse in the torn open belly of which a dog had made its lair. While I was drawing, I heard a bugle sounding a march and soon I saw the bugler coming out. Upon the breach; behind him marched a sub-lieutenant, sword in hand, and then in place of men, a string of donkeys, led by about a dozen Zouave irregulars. Puzzled, I went up to the bugler and, stopping him, I asked what he was blowing for. "Why,"

he replied rocking from one foot to another with his bugle on his hip, "this is the volunteer company from Bougie going back to headquarters."

"What?"

"Those are the rifles on the donkeys, there--everybody killed in the a.s.sault; there is n.o.body left but us." He began blowing again. The donkeys pa.s.sed on and I bared my head to them.

Confident in the impregnability of his town, the Bey of Constantine had left his harem there and the ladies of it were shut up in the palace, which had been turned into head-quarters, and where I was living with Nemours. As may be imagined, this harem gave me subjects for many sketches, which disappeared, unluckily for me, in the sacking of the Tuileries on February 24th, 1848. In one of the courtyards, planted with orange-trees and roses, and surrounded by the elegant Moorish balconies of the Bey's Palace, there was a little door, which had been confided to the care of the vivandiere of the 47th Regiment and of a sergeant major of spahis, of the name of Bel-Ka.s.sem. It was the door into the harem and gave access to several courts, surrounded by galleries, both on the ground floor and first story, on which opened s.p.a.cious rooms carpeted with divans and cushions and with shelves all round piled with quant.i.ties of things, knick-knacks, and, above all, stuffs, especially silken ones. The women--there were over two hundred of them--spent their lives night and day alike, squatting or lying on the cushions in these apartments. They were divided into two categories. The negresses, who formed the great majority, occupied two court-yards, and these courts exhaled a fetid odour which poisoned the whole of the Bey's palace, whenever the wind blew from that quarter.

The white and sallow-complexioned women all lived together, they all wore Arab dress, with more or fewer trinkets, and there were some pretty women among them. Two were Greeks and there was one really beautiful Moorish woman, called Ayescha. I did her likeness, and that of the chief eunuch as well. He was a negro, growing grey, with a deceitful hypocritical eye all m.u.f.fled up in very fine haiks which showed nothing but the tip of his nose, and legs which were entirely guiltless of calf. That sitting would have been a good subject for a picture--I drawing, the ladies of the harem hanging over me watching me work, and the negro standing and swearing as he stood, while Ayescha went to and fro lavishing the quaintest caresses on him, to keep him in good temper.

One evening, General Vallee had an entertainment got up for him in the harem. There were great illuminations, singing, music with tambourine accompaniment and the danse du ventre. Amongst those present was General de Caraman, who commanded the artillery. He was seized with cholera just as he was going away, and was dead by six o'clock the next morning. Such is life! Several adventures arose out of the fact of the harem's presence. One fine night, when everybody was asleep, two of the officers of infantry irregulars on guard took it into their heads to knock at the door, and were filled with delighted surprise on hearing the gentle voice of the good-natured cantiniere reply, "Is that you?

Well upon my word," and the door opened. But within less than two minutes the frightful uproar caused by two hundred women shrieking at once roused the whole of head-quarters, and our two officers tore full pace back to the guardroom and got the men under arms. This scare, and it may be some others too, added to the pestiferous smell from the negresses' quarters, made the authorities resolve to get rid of all this human cattle and distribute it amongst the most well-to-do of the Mussulman population. I went to look on at their departure, which was presided over by a major on the staff, a.s.sisted by a detachment of irregulars. The women had been warned the evening before, and leave had been given for each to take away as much as she herself could carry. So they had spent the whole night rolling as many precious stuffs round their waists as they could support the weight of, and we found ourselves face to face with human balloons, like monstrous gourds. They could hardly walk, even when held up by the soldiers, and getting through the doorways was more difficult still. Some of them, hauled at in front and pushed from behind, shot through like the cork of a champagne bottle. Others, who could not squeeze through at all, were made over to the soldiers to be reduced to the necessary size, the whole thing accompanied by a chorus of shouts and objurgations of every kind. But to pa.s.s from the harem to graver subjects. On October 18th, I was present at the military funeral of the Comte Damremont. It was a moving sight. Some few hundred yards from the spot where he had been killed, just at the foot of the breach, a cenotaph had been built of sand-bags, on which the coffin, with his General's cloak, and his sword and white feathered hat laid on it, had been placed. The weather had gone into mourning too, for the occasion. It was a very gloomy day. The whole Arab population was looking on, squatting on the walls. On the top of the breach were planted the colours of the 47th Regiment. Below it the Zouaves' drums rolled a funeral march, while the officers did obeisance for the last time to the remains of their former general. And what officers they were too! How many future men of mark there were in that a.s.semblage, which, not to mention its chiefs, numbered Captains Niel, Canrobert, MacMahon, St. Arnault, Le Boeuf, Ladmirault, Morris, Leflo, and many another in its ranks!

The army left Constantine in two detachments. I returned with the second, which escorted the general in command, who had fallen sick, and an enormous convoy of fever patients and cripples of all sorts. It was a dreary journey back, for the column was decimated by cholera, and the road was strewed with corpses. Every minute soldiers were to be seen dropping their muskets and writhing in the most awful convulsions. My brother, who commanded the rear-guard, spent his whole time having the poor wretches picked up and tied into mule litters. They were thence drafted into the ambulance wagons, which were crowded already, and there they died like flies. As soon as a man died, the other occupants of the wagon united their efforts and heaved him overboard. When the convoy started every morning a row of corpses marked the spot the wagons had been on during the night. A detachment of engineers covered them over with a little soil, but we had hardly moved off before the Arabs swooped down from all directions and uncovered and stripped them.

I was ill myself by the time the columns got to Bona--fever had me in its grip, but thanks to severe physicking I was almost my own man again by the time I rejoined my ship at Algiers. She went to sea almost at once. I had a relapse at Senegal, but the ocean pa.s.sage completely cured me, and I was quite in smooth water by the time we reached the South American coast. Rio de Janeiro was our first port. I need not enlarge on the magnificent view presented by the Bay of Rio, which has been so frequently described by travellers. It was during this stay in harbour that I first saw the young princess who was later to become the Princess de Joinville, the devoted companion of my whole life. During this stay, too, I made an expedition to Minas, the gold mine country, a long journey on mule-back, through the magnificent monotony of the virgin forest. One of the mines I went to see, called Gongo-Soco, was worked by the labour of four hundred slaves, and owned by an English company who made an enormous profit out of it. I went down it, and, under the guidance of some Cornish miners, I had a try with a pick and succeeded in getting out several nuggets as thick as my little finger.

As the vein was princ.i.p.ally manganese, we were black all over when we came out of the mine, but a body of negresses came at once to wash us.

Another expedition I made into the "camp" initiated me into a sort of sport which was new to me--hunting wild horses with a la.s.so. After having admired the extraordinary skill of the camperos in doing this, I tried it myself, and that not altogether unsuccessfully--it is a fascinating occupation.

To finish up our stay at Rio, we gave the emperor and his family, and the whole of society both foreign and Brazilian, a ball on board our ship. Towards the end of the evening, I turned a young lion I had been given in Senegal loose in the ball-room, and his appearance somewhat disturbed the figures of the cotillon.

From Rio the Hercule called in succession at Guiana, Martinique and Guadaloupe. The low sh.o.r.es of Guiana are clothed with mangrove swamps, the trees of which seemed scarlet, so covered were they with red ibises! Nothing more gay-looking can be imagined than the Cayenne River, and the pretty town standing on its banks--the wooden houses all separated from each other by gardens in which the tropical vegetation displays an unexampled luxuriance and variety. Flowers of every hue, set among huge calabash trees, gigantic palms of every kind, such as the traveller's palm with its immense fan-shaped leaves, bread-fruit trees, and many more, charm the eye with a wealth of colour which must be seen before it can be realized. Though the Cayenne River may be charming, the other arms of the Guiana delta, great rivers, hedged in by thick dark forest walls, are far gloomier to the sight. But those magnificent forests, peopled with creatures of all sorts, and especially with an infinite number of birds, of the most varied and dazzling plumage, have the irresistible attraction that hangs about life in the wilds.

I went up several of these rivers, such as the Aprouague and the Mana River, and visited the carbets, or villages, of several Indian tribes, the Norags, and the Galibis, which last were still quite savage at the time of which I write, armed with bows and arrows, and obtaining a light by rubbing two bits of stick together--a thing I actually saw them do. Men and women alike were red-skinned, tartar-eyed, their smooth hair dyed with "rocou," a sort of madder, and with a small strip of cotton pa.s.sed between the legs as their only garment. The women were particularly frightful. Almost all of them had huge stomachs, which they held up with their hands just like a monkey's pouch, and all wore a kind of tight bracelet above and below their knees and ankles, which caused the intervening parts to swell, and gave their legs the appearance of skewers with Dutch cheeses on them. Apart from the savages, the general impression of Guiana remaining with me is that of a great hot-house, in which everything was as improbably huge as in one of Gustave Dore's ill.u.s.trations--where I came across apricots as big as my head, and caimans ten yards long. As regards the inhabitants, I recollect Creoles, enervated by the climate, who were as kindly as they were intelligent; pale-faced women, languorous and seductive, with soft low murmuring voices; and lastly, just as I pa.s.sed through, a negro drum-major of the National Guard, with a great big busby and a plume that was a dream!

My recollection of Martinique and Guadaloupe bring them back to me as lovely green islands of volcanic outline. The former especially struck me as being exceedingly picturesque, its hills covered with pleasant-looking habitations with the peaks of the Carbet veiled in the dark clouds brought by the trade winds, for background. I had to review the troops on the Savana, the promenade of Fort Royal, but I confess I took more interest in the costume of the beautiful quadroons, or quarterbred mulatto women, than in the review itself. This costume is worth describing. A brilliant-coloured bandanna, knotted round the head in the most fanciful manner, no stays of course, nothing but an embroidered chemise, showing a magnificent outline, and a bright-coloured skirt, yellow or rose-coloured, trained at the back, but gathered up on one side, to show a beautiful bare leg. When I add that these women often have a creamy white complexion which many a European would envy, the proud exclamation of the old householder, dragged I know not why before a court of justice, will be appreciated.

To the Judge's question "What is your profession?" he replied "My profession! I keep up the supply of Mulattos!" "Je fais des mulatres!"

It was in the days of the greatest prosperity of our beautiful Antilles that the old boaster spoke. When I arrived, this was already on the wane, and it really was tiresome not to be allowed to talk about anything but sugar and emanc.i.p.ation by the Creoles.

Nowadays what we call progress has done its work, and these colonies, which used to be an element of national wealth, employing a whole navy of merchantmen, and which served as nursery for the sailors of our warships, are now no more than machines for electing Radical Deputies, and thus increasing the number of agents of the national destruction.

At Martinique, we joined the flag of the admiral in command of the station. I have served under many admirals, one more eccentric than the other. One of the first, an excellent seaman, had one pa.s.sion only, music--and his instrument was the double ba.s.s. He spent his time performing solos on this c.u.mbrous instrument, which he would then put away in a small apartment known in the old-fashioned navy as la bouteille. Sometimes the sea-water came through the port, and flooded everything. When the admiral fetched his double ba.s.s out, and began his tunes, he would notice from the sound that the body was full of water, and then every sort of dodge would be resorted to, to get the liquid poured out by the sound holes. The poor admiral! There is a story that his double ba.s.s was victim one day of the spite of certain seamen, who marked their displeasure by pouring something less clean than sea-water into the big fiddle. This same gallant admiral having gone ash.o.r.e once upon a time, at St. Louis in Senegal, and finding the bar there continued so impa.s.sable that he could not rejoin his ship, sent her round to Goree, and went there himself overland slung under a camel's belly, and armed with an umbrella,--which proved his complete ignorance of the miracles of the Prophet Mohammed.

My commanding officer at the time of which I write was another oddity.

Imagine a thin little man, as hot as pepper, adorned with a hooked nose and chin, one as huge as the other. A real old-fashioned gentleman, always tightly b.u.t.toned up in the most irreproachably correct of garments, and with all the exquisite and formal politeness of the old school. Everybody was fond of the good old fellow, who heightened the oddity of his appearance on board his own ship by wearing a huge straw hat like the bell-crowned hat Eugene Sue puts on the head of M. Pipelet in the Mysteres de Paris, and a song had been composed about him, which we used to sing together and the chorus of which began "Bon! bon! de la Bretonniere! Bon Bon!"--la Bretonniere being his name. This same officer saved Admiral Magon's ship after Trafalgar, and later on he commanded the Breslaw at Navarino and showed the most consummate bravery there. His flagship was the Didon, which ship, having run aground several times, had earned the nickname of "Dido the touching"

(la touchante Didon). Poor old Didon! I had sailed with her before and the sight of her gave me the same feeling of grateful recollection that stirs within a man who meets an old love. After a short cruise with the whole squadron the admiral led the way to the British island of Jamaica.

We had hardly cast anchor before he sent to ask the British Governor when he would receive him, and, the appointment duly made, he sent for me to go with him. An aide-de-camp received us at the landing-stage, silently pointed to the governor's carriage, which awaited us, and disappeared. The carriage in question was a phaeton with room for two people in it, and a little seat behind for the groom, who was standing at the horses' heads with true British correctness. Says the admiral to me, "Are we to go in that?"

"Yes, sir."

"But," and he took two steps to the rear, "there isn't any coachman."

"You are to drive yourself, sir."

With a half turn to the right he replied, "I! Impossible! I've never been able to get a horse to go in my life. Do you know how to drive?"

"A little, sir."

"Then take the reins, sir!"