ilors 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 two sailors,
thinking him asleep, joined the pil