s, gentlemen."

At these words the two sailors seized the king end hoisted him on to
their shoulders, and carried him into the sea; in another moment he was
on board. Langlade and Blancard sprang in behind him. Donadieu remained
at the helm, the two other officers undertook the management of the boat,
and began their work by unfurling the sails. Immediately the pinnace
seemed to rouse herself like a horse at touch of the spur; the sailors
cast a careless glance back, and Murat feeling that they were sailing
away, turned towards his host and called for a last time--

"You have your route as far as Trieste. Do not forget my wife!...
Good-bye-good-bye----!"

"God keep you, sire!" murmured Marouin.

And for some time, thanks to the white sail which gleamed through the
darkness, he could follow with his eyes the boat which was rapidly
disappearing; at last it vanished altogether. Marouin lingered on the
shore, though he could see nothing; then he heard a cry, made faint by
the distance; it was Murat's last adieu to France.

When M. Marouin was telling me these details one evening on the very spot
where it all happened, though twenty years had passed, he remembered
clearly the slightest incidents of the embarkation that night. From that
moment he assured me that a presentiment of misfortune seized him; he
could not tear himself away from the shore, and several times he longed
to call the king back, but, like a man in a dream, he opened his mouth
without being able to utter a sound. He was afraid of being thought
foolish, and it was not until one o'clock that is, two and a half hours
after the departure of the boat-that he went home with a sad and heavy
heart.

The adventurous navigators had taken the course from Toulon to Bastia,
and at first it seemed to the king that the sailors' predictions were
belied; the wind, instead of getting up, fell little by little, and two
hours after the departure the boat was rocking without moving forward or
backward on the waves, which were sinking from moment to moment. Murat
sadly watched the phosphorescent furrow trailing behind the little boat:
he had nerved himself to face a storm, but not a dead calm, and without
even interrogating his companions, of whose uneasiness he took no
account, he lay down in the boat, wrapped in his cloak, closing his eyes
as if he were asleep, and following the flow of his thoughts, which were
far more tumultuous than that of the waters. Soon the