Two days later we set sail for France, which was reached after a passage of forty-one days.  During the passage, feeling anxious at having had no news from Europe for four months, I spoke several ships, and amongst others, south of the line, I spoke a Dutch man-o’-war on her way to Java, which gave us details of the coalition apparently directed against Mehemet Ali, the Egyptian Viceroy, but aimed, in reality, at France.  Not knowing what might result from the performances of the allied naval forces on the Syrian coast, we on board the frigate and her consort, the Favorite, determined to take all usual precautions in case of war; and each of us made ready, after his own fashion, for his eventual departure to another world.  There was, in most cases, a great destroying of souvenirs, papers, and compromising correspondence.  General Gourgaud attracted our attention by the trembling care with which he re-read a perfect mountain of notes in a feminine hand, which he burnt one by one in a basin, gathering up the ashes and preserving them in a bottle—­not a bad way of keeping tender memories quite safe from any inquisitiveness But all these warlike preparations were thrown away.  When the Belle Poule cast anchor at Cherbourg on November 3Oth, the storm had passed by.  My mission closed at Cherbourg, but I found orders there to tranship the coffin on to a steamboat, and then take it round to Paris by the Seine, my crew and that of the corvette Favorite to form the escort.  I will not tell the story of this conveying of the body.  At St Helena things had on the whole been done by the British army on the one part and our naval forces on the other, with all the chivalrous seriousness and dignity which always attend international relations when confided to those who wear the sword.  In France the conveyance of the remains of Napoleon took on quite another character.  It was first and foremost a show, in which, as always happens in our country, many people desired to play a part which was inappropriate and sometimes ridiculous.  I had often to interfere to get things put to rights again.  At La Bouille, for instance, which we reached at nightfall, to meet the river flotilla to which we were to be transferred, I was shown, as the vessel which was to receive the coffin and the staff of the escort, a frightful-looking boat on which a sort of hideous dais had been built, with all the frippery and plumes of the Pompes Funebres, an official catafalque worthy of Carpentras or of Brives-la-Gaillarde.  I immediately gave orders for this masterpiece of bad taste to be destroyed, a coat of black paint given to the boat, and everything cleared forward, so as to place the coffin there well in sight, and covered with a violet velvet pall.  My men at once fell to work at this transformation, when a gentleman in evening dress advanced, and in a tone of great authority, forbade my sailors to touch anything.  “I got my orders from M. Cave (the Director of the Beaux Arts) and from the Minister.  All the decoration