According to Keith, Nelson “on this occasion, as on all others, conducted himself with skill, and great address, in comprehending my signals, which the state of the weather led me greatly to suspect.”  Nelson’s account to Hamilton was, “By leaving my admiral without signal, for which I may be broke, I took these French villains.”  “I have wrote to Lord Spencer,” he tells his eldest brother, “and have sent him my journal, to show that the Genereux was taken by me, and my plan—­that my quitting Lord Keith was at my own risk, and for which, if I had not succeeded, I might have been broke.  The way he went, the Genereux never could have been taken.”  In a letter to Lord Minto he attributed his success to his knowledge of all the local conditions, acquired by seven years’ experience.  In his anxiety to make this instance prove his case, in the previous disobedience to Keith, for which the Admiralty had censured him, Nelson overreached himself and certainly fell into an ungenerous action.  His vaunt of success by the road of disobedience rested only on the fact that he had failed to see Keith’s signal.  This the latter did not know, and evidently considered he had complied with its spirit.  The signal to chase to windward was not strained to disobedience in being construed to search a fairly wide area for the enemy, keeping the rendezvous, which was also the enemy’s destination, to leeward, so as to be readily regained.  The “Queen Charlotte,” Keith’s flagship, covered the inner line, and, being a first-rate, was competent to handle any force that could come out of Toulon.  There is a good deal of human nature in this captious unofficial attack on a superior, whose chief fault, as towards himself, was that he had been the victim of disobedience; but it is not pleasant to see in a man so truly great.

The “Genereux” carried the flag of a rear-admiral, who was killed in the action.  Nelson seized the opportunity of further conciliating the Czar, by sending the sword of this officer to him, as Grand Master of the Order of Malta.  Upon rejoining Keith, he reported in person, as custom demands.  “Lord Keith received my account and myself like a philosopher (but very unlike you),” he wrote to Hamilton; “it did not, that I could perceive, cause a pleasing muscle in his face.”  “Had you seen the Peer receive me,” he wrote to Lady Hamilton the same day, “I know not what you would have done; but I can guess.  But never mind.  I told him that I had made a vow, if I took the Genereux by myself, it was my intention to strike my flag.  To which he made no answer.”  What could he very well say, if a man chose to throw away his chances, especially when that man was a subordinate who a short time before had flatly refused to obey his orders.  Soreness and testiness had full swing in Nelson at this time; at some fancied neglect, he wrote Troubridge a letter which reduced that gallant officer to tears.