te it."

"You, individually, can do what may seem to you best," answered the
Englishman; "as to the merchant vessels under your escort, they will be,
I repeat to you, taken to Admiral Collingwood." And he immediately gave
orders to those vessels to set sail to the East.

The frigate had already gone a little distance when she perceived that
we were steering towards Marseilles. Having then learnt from the crews
of the merchant vessels that we were ourselves laden with cotton, she
tacked about to seize us.

She was very near reaching us, when we were enabled to enter the port of
the little island of Pomegue. In the night she put her boats to sea to
try to carry us off; but the enterprise was too perilous, and she did
not dare attempt it.

The next morning, 2d of July, 1809, I disembarked at the lazaretto.

At the present day they go from Algiers to Marseilles in four days; it
had taken me eleven months to make the same voyage. It is true that here
and there I had made involuntary sojourns.

My letters sent from the lazaretto at Marseilles were considered by my
relatives and friends as certificates of resurrection, they having for a
long time past supposed me dead. A great geometer had even proposed to
the Bureau of Longitude no longer to pay my allowance to my authorized
representative; which appears the more cruel inasmuch as this
representative was my father.

The first letter which I received from Paris was full of sympathy and
congratulations on the termination of my laborious and perilous
adventures; it was from a man already in possession of an European
reputation, but whom I had never seen: M. de Humboldt, after what he had
heard of my misfortunes, offered me his friendship. Such was the first
origin of a connection which dates from nearly forty-two years back,
without a single cloud ever paving troubled it.

M. Dubois Thainville had numerous acquaintances in Marseilles; his wife
was a native of that town, and her family resided there. They received,
therefore, both of them, numerous visits in the parlour of the
lazaretto. The bell which summoned them, for me alone was dumb; and I
remained as solitary and forsaken, at the gates of a town peopled with a
hundred thousand of my countrymen, as if I had been in the heart of
Africa. One day, however, the parlour-bell rang three times (the number
of times corresponding to the number of my room); I thought it must be a
mistake. I did not, however, allow this to ap