ON BOARD THE "ORION."

Toward the close of October, in the same year, 1823, the inhabitants of Toulon saw a vessel enter their port which had sustained some damage in a heavy storm. It was the "Orion," which at a later date was employed at Brest as a training school, but now formed part of the Mediterranean fleet. This vessel, battered as it was, for the sea had ill-treated it, produced an effect on entering the roads. It displayed some flag which obtained it the regulation salute of eleven guns, to which it replied round for round,—a total of two-and-twenty rounds. It has been calculated that in salvos, royal and military politeness, exchanges of courtesy signals, formalities of roads and citadels, sunrise and sunset saluted every day by all the fortresses and vessels of war, opening and closing gates, etc., the civilized world fired every twenty-four hours, and in all parts of the globe, one hundred and fifty thousand useless rounds. At six francs the round, this makes 900,000 francs a day. Three hundred millions a year expended in smoke. During this time poor people are dying of starvation.

The year 1823 was what the Restoration called "the epoch of the Spanish war." This war contained many events in one, and many singularities. It was a great family affair for the House of Bourbon; the French branch succoring and protecting the Madrid branch, that is to say, proving its majority; an apparent return to national traditions, complicated by servitude and subjection to the northern cabinets. The Duc d'Angoulême, surnamed by the liberal papers the "hero of Andujar," repressing in a triumphal attitude, which what somewhat spoiled by his peaceful looks, the old and very real terrorism of the Holy Office, which was contending with the chimerical terrorism of the liberals; the sans culottes resuscitated to the great alarm of dowagers, under the name of Descamisados; monarchy offering an obstacle to the progress which it termed anarchy; the theories of '89 suddenly interrupted in their sap; a European check given to the French idea which was making its voyage round the world by the side of the Generalissimo son of France; the Prince de Carignan, afterwards Charles Albert, enrolling himself as a volunteer with the red wool epaulettes of a grenadier in this crusade of the kings against the peoples; the soldiers of the empire taking the field again, after eight years rest, aged, sad, and wearing the white cockade; the tricolor waved in a foreign country by an heroic handful of Frenchmen, as the white flag had been at Coblentz thirty years previously; monks mingled with the French troopers; the spirit of liberty and novelty set right by bayonets; principles checkmated by artillery; France undoing by her arms what she had done by her mind; the enemy's leaders sold; the soldiers hesitating; towns besieged by millions; no military perils, and yet possible explosions, as in every mine which is surprised and invaded; disgrace for a few persons, and glory for none,—such was this war, brought about by princes who descended from Louis XIV., and conducted by generals who issued from Napoleon. It had the sad fate of recalling neither the great war nor the great policy.

Some engagements were serious. The passage of the Trocadero, for instance, was a brilliant military achievement; but on the whole, we repeat, the trumpets of that war have a cracked sound, the whole affair was suspicious, and history agrees with France in the difficulty of accepting this false triumph. It seemed evident that certain Spanish officers ordered to resist, yielded too easily, and the idea of corruption was evolved from the victory; it seemed as if generals rather than battles had been gained, and the victorious soldier returned home humiliated. It was, in truth, a diminishing war, and the words "Bank of France" could be read in the folds of the flag. The soldiers of the war of 1808, on whom the ruins of Saragossa fell so formidably, frowned in 1823 at the easy opening of citadel gates, and began regretting Palafox. It is the humor of France to prefer a Rostopchin before her rather than a Ballesteros. From a more serious point of view, on which it is right to dwell here, this war, which offended the military spirit in France, humiliated the democratic spirit. It was undertaken on behalf of serfdom; in this campaign the object of the French soldier, who was the son of democracy, was to bow others under the yoke. This was a hideous mistake, for France has the mission of arousing the soul of nations, and not stifling it. Since 1792 all the revolutions of Europe have been the French Revolution, and liberty radiates from France. He must be blind who does not recognize this. It was Bonaparte who said so.

The war of 1823, an attempt upon the generous Spanish nation, was therefore at the same time an attack on the French Revolution. It was France that committed this monstrous act of violence; for, with the exception of wars of liberation, all that armies do they do by force, as the words "passive obedience" indicate. An army is a strange masterpiece of combination, in which strength results from an enormous amount of impotence. In this way can we explain war carried on by humanity against humanity, in spite of humanity. The war of 1823 was fatal to the Bourbons; they regarded it as a triumph, for they did not see what danger there is in killing an idea by a countersign. In their simplicity they committed the mistake of introducing into this establishment the immense weakness of a crime as an element of strength; the spirit of ambuscading entered into their policy, and 1830 germinated in 1823. The Spanish campaign became in their councils an argument for oppression, and the government by right divine. France, having re-established el rey neto in Spain, could establish the absolute king at home. They fell into the formidable error of taking the obedience of the soldier for the consent of the nation, and such a confidence is the destruction of thrones. Men must go to sleep neither in the shadow of a machineel-tree nor in that of an army.

Let us now return to the "Orion." During the operations of the army commanded by the Prince generalissimo a squadron cruised in the Mediterranean, to which, as we said, the "Orion" belonged, and was driven into Toulon roads to repair damages. The presence of a man-of-war in a port has something about it which attracts and occupies the mob. It is grand, and the multitude love anything that is grand. A vessel of the line is one of the most magnificent encounters which the genius of man has with the might of nature; it is composed simultaneously of what is the heaviest and lightest of things, because it has to deal with three forms of substance at once,—the solid, the liquid, and the fluid, and must contend against all three. It has cloven iron claws to seize the granite of the sea-bed, and more wings and antennæ than the two-winged insect to hold the wind. Its breath issues from its one hundred and twenty guns as through enormous bugles, and haughtily replies to the thunder. Ocean tries to lead it astray in the frightful similitude of its waves; but the vessel has its soul in its compass, which advises it and always shows it the north, and on dark nights its lanterns take the place of the stars. Hence it has tackle and canvas to oppose the wind, wood to oppose water, iron, copper, and lead to oppose the rocks, light to oppose darkness, and a needle to oppose immensity. If we wish to form an idea of all the gigantic proportions whose ensemble constitute a vessel of the line, we need only enter one of the covered building-docks at Toulon or Brest. The vessels in construction are there under glass, so to speak. That colossal beam is a yard; that huge column of wood of enormous length lying on the ground is the main-mast. Measuring from its root in the keel to its truck in the clouds it is three hundred and sixty feet in length, and is three feet in diameter at its base. The navy of our fathers employed hemp cables, but ours has chains; the simple pile of chain cable for a hundred-gun vessel is four feet high and twenty feet in width. And then, again, in building such a vessel three thousand loads of wood are used; it is a floating forest. And it must not be left out of sight that we are here describing a man-of-war of forty years ago, a simple sailing-vessel; steam, then in its infancy, has since added new miracles to the prodigy which is called a vessel of war. At the present day, for instance, the screw man-of-war is a surprising machine, impelled by a surface of canvas containing three thousand square yards, and a boiler of two thousand five hundred horse power. Without alluding to these new marvels, the old vessel of Christopher Columbus and De Ruyter is one of the great masterpieces of man; it is inexhaustible in strength as infinity is in width; it garners the wind in its sails, it is exact in the immense diffusion of the waves; it floats, and it reigns.

And yet the hour arrives when a gust breaks like a straw this yard, fifty feet in length; when the wind bends like a reed this mast, four hundred feet in height; when this anchor, weighing thousands of pounds, twists in the throat of the waves like a fisherman's hook in the mouth of a pike; when these monstrous cannon utter plaintive and useless groans, which the wind carries away into emptiness and night, and when all this power and majesty are swallowed up by a superior power and majesty. Whenever an immense force is displayed in attacking immense weakness, it causes men to reflect. Hence at seaports curious persons throng around these marvellous machines of war and navigation, without exactly explaining the reason to themselves. Every day, then, from morning till night, the quays and piers of Toulon were covered with numbers of idlers, whose business it was to look at the "Orion." This vessel had long been in a sickly state. During previous voyages barnacles had collected on her hull to such an extent that she lost half her speed; she had been taken into dry dock the year previous to scrape off these barnacles, and then put to sea again. But this scraping had injured the bolts, and when off the Balearic Isles, she sprang a leak, and took in water, as vessels were not coppered in those days. A violent equinoctial gale supervened, which injured her larboard bows and destroyed the fore-chains. In consequence of this damage the "Orion" put into Toulon, and anchored near the arsenal for repairs. The hull was uninjured, but a few planks had been unnailed here and there to let air in, as is usually the case.

One morning the crowd witnessed an accident. The crew were engaged in bending the sails, and the top-man, who had charge of the starboard tack of the main-top-sail, lost his balance. He was seen to totter, the crowd on the arsenal quay uttered a cry, his head dragged him downwards, and he turned round the yard, with his hands stretched down to the water; but he caught hold of the foot-rope as he passed it, first with one hand then with the other, and remained hanging from it. The sea was below him at a dizzy depth, and the shock of his fall had given the foot-rope a violent swinging movement. The man swung at the end of the rope like a stone in a sling. To go to his assistance would be running a frightful risk, and not one of the sailors, all coast fishermen lately called in for duty, dared to venture it. Still the unhappy top-man was growing tired: his agony could not be seen in his face, but his exhaustion could be distinguished in all his limbs, and his arms were awfully dragged. Any effort he made to raise himself only caused the foot-rope to oscillate the more, and he did not cry out, for fear of exhausting his strength. The minute was close at hand when he must let go the rope, and every now and then all heads were turned away not to see it happen. There are moments in which a rope, a pole, the branch of a tree, is life itself, and it is a fearful thing to see a living being let go of it and fall like ripe fruit. All at once a man could be seen climbing up the shrouds with the agility of a tiger-cat. As he was dressed in red, this man was a convict; as he wore a green cap, he was a convict for life. On reaching the top a puff of wind blew away his cap and displayed a white head; hence he was not a young man.

A convict, employed on board with a gang, had in fact at once run up to the officer of the watch, and in the midst of the trouble and confusion, while all the sailors trembled and recoiled, asked permission to risk his life in saving the top-man. At a nod of assent from the officer he broke with one blow of a hammer the chain riveted to his ankle, took up a rope, and darted up the shrouds. No one noticed at the moment with what ease this chain was broken; and the fact was not remembered till afterwards. In a second he was upon the yard, where he stood for a little while as if looking round him. These seconds, during which the wind swung the top-man at the end of a thread, seemed ages to the persons who were looking at him. At length the convict raised his eyes to heaven and advanced a step. The crowd breathed again, as they saw him run along the yard. On reaching the end he fastened to it the rope he had brought with him, let it hang down, and then began going down it hand over hand. This produced a feeling of indescribable agony, for instead of one man hanging over the gulf, there were now two. He resembled a spider going to seize a fly; but in this case the spider brought life and not death. Ten thousand eyes were fixed on the group: not a cry, not a word could be heard; every mouth held its breath, as if afraid of increasing in the slightest degree the wind that shook the two wretched men. The convict, in the interim, had managed to get close to the sailor, and it was high time, for a minute later the man, exhausted and desperate, would have let himself drop into the sea. The convict fastened him securely with the rope to which he clung with one hand, while he worked with the other. At length he was seen to climb back to the yard and haul the sailor up: he supported him there for a moment to let him regain his strength, then took him in his arms and carried him along the yard to the cap, and thence to the top, where he left him with his comrades. The crowd applauded him, and several old sergeants of the chain-gang had tears in their eyes: women embraced each other on the quay, and every voice could be heard shouting with a species of frenzy,—"Pardon for that man!"

The convict, however, began going down again immediately to rejoin his gang. In order to do so more rapidly he slid down a rope and ran along a lower yard. All eyes followed him, and at one moment the spectators felt afraid, for they fancied they could see him hesitate and totter, either through fatigue or dizziness; all at once the crowd uttered a terrible cry,—the convict had fallen into the sea. The fall was a dangerous one, for the frigate "Algésiras" was anchored near the "Orion," and the poor galley-slave had fallen between the two ships, and might be sucked under one of them. Four men hastily got into a boat, and the crowd encouraged them, for all felt anxious again. The man did not come to the surface again, and disappeared in the sea without making a ripple, just as if he had fallen into a barrel of oil. They dragged for him, but in vain; they continued the search till nightfall, but his body was not even found. The next day the Toulon paper printed the following lines: "Nov. 17, 1823.—Yesterday a convict, one of a gang on board the "Orion," fell into the sea and was drowned, as he was returning from assisting a sailor. His body has not been found, and is supposed to be entangled among the piles at arsenal point. The man was imprisoned as No. 9430, and his name the Jean Valjean."

BOOK III.