Among my father’s aides-de-camp there was a young cavalry lieutenant-colonel, the Comte d’Houdetot, who had begun life as a midshipman.  He was a very clever man, and one of the most delightful story-tellers imaginable.  By birth a creole, from the Mauritius, he and his family had happened to come back to Europe on board the corvette La Regeneree, commanded by that same Admiral Villaumetz, our neighbour and constant visitor in the billiard-room.  At the time of the voyage D’Houdetot was a baby in arms, and in an action between the Regeneree and the English, at the Loos Islands, his wet nurse was cut in two by a round shot, which gave rise to a saying of his, “I have more right to promotion than anybody.  Lots of people have had horses killed under them, but I’m the only man in the French army that ever had a woman killed under him.”

Mutually attracted by this common memory, the former middy and the old admiral used to spend their evenings relating their adventures to each other and their stories, which had begun by interesting, ended by fascinating me.  It was worth while to hear D’Houdetot tell about the battle of Trafalgar, at which he had been present as a midshipman on board the Algesiras, commanded by his uncle Admiral Magon, how, as he lay on the poop, with both his legs broken by the bursting of a shell, he saw his uncle the admiral receive his death-blow, at the very moment when, wounded already, and his hat and wig carried away by a shot, he had thrown himself on to the nettings, shouting to his crew, “The first man who boards that ship with me shall have the Cross;” and how too, the boarding party having been driven back, the mizzen-mast of the Algesiras, cut through by a round shot, fell across the British ship, throwing a comrade of D’Houdetot’s, the midshipman of the maintop, beyond it, into the sea, and how that middy swam back to the Algesiras.  And then came the story of the tempest after the battle, in which victors and vanquished alike struggled together to escape shipwreck, under the command of Lieutenant de la Bretonniere, in later days my own commanding officer, who succeeded in bringing the ship into Cadiz.  There D’Houdetot was lying upon the mole, under a burning sun, feverish and exhausted with pain, when the hand of a woman, whom his youth had touched, spread a fan over “the poor little fellow’s” head, to protect him from the blaze.  He drew the ministering hand to him, and kissed it, and to that simple act he owed his escape from the horrors of an overcrowded hospital, teeming with typhus.  He recovered, re-embarked on board the frigate Hermione, and was wrecked with her.  “Trafalgar and a shipwreck in the space of two years,” he used to say, “gave me enough of a seafaring life.”  He got leave to be transferred to the cavalry, and covered himself with glory in the heroic charges at the battle of the Moskowa; but his heart always remained with his old sailor comrades, and he never tired of talking about them.