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 pilot, and sitting down beside the helm, they began to consult together.

“You were wrong, Langlade,” said Donadieu, “in choosing a craft like this, which is either too small or else too big; in an open boat we can never weather a storm, and without oars we can never make any way in a calm.”

“’Fore God!  I had no choice.  I was obliged to take what I could get, and if it had not been the season for tunny-fishing I might not even have got this wretched pinnace, or rather I should have had to go into the harbour to find it, and they keep such a sharp lookout that I might well have gone in without coming out again.”

“At least it is seaworthy,” said Blancard.

“Pardieu, you know what nails and planks are when they have been soaked in sea-water for ten years.  On any ordinary occasion, a man would rather not go in her from Marseilles to the Chateau d’If, but on an occasion like this one would willingly go round the world in a nutshell.”

“Hush!” said Donadieu.  The sailors listened; a distant growl was heard, but it was so faint that only the experienced ear of a sailor could have distinguished it.

“Yes, yes,” said Langlade, “it is a warning for those who have legs or wings to regain the homes and nests that they ought never to have left.”

“Are we far from the islands?” asked Donadieu quickly.

“About a mile off.”

“Steer for them.”

“What for?” asked Murat, looking up.

“To put in there, sire, if we can.”