The King of Aragon, Don Jaime, is buried in the fine cathedral of Palma His body rests in the sacristy, in the drawer of a kind of press, in which I saw it lying, while one of the canons, to impress me with a sense of its perfect preservation, drummed with his fingers on the stomach of the corpse!

On our way to the Balearic Islands we fulfilled a pious duty.  After the unhappy capitulation of Baylen and its shameful violation, our unfortunate soldiers, victims of this piece of weakness and disloyalty, were cast upon an island called Cabrera, a bare and desert spot, where most of them died of hunger, abandoned and forgotten by the whole world.  Having heard that their bones were lying scattered about unburied on the isle, I had them laid in consecrated soil, and over them, through the agency of our consul, M. Cabarrus, we raised a monument, subscribed for by the whole squadron, with this inscription: 

To the memory of the French soldiers who died at Cabrera.

  Erected by the evolutionary squadron, 1847.

We made a short stay at the inevitable Tunis, and left it under a shower of presents, from the Order of the Nicham in diamonds to six thousand dozens of eggs.  But the shortness in duration of our visit was new, and requires some explanation.

One of our first cares, after the completion of our conquest of Algeria, had been to insure tranquillity on its Moorish frontier to the west, and its Tunisian boundary on the east.  On the Morocco side we had been forced to have recourse to heavy ordnance for this purpose.  On the Tunisian frontier, where the population is both less fanatical and less warlike, we had followed a different course of procedure.  We had gained the Bey’s friendship by promising to support his power against the Forte’s claim to suzerainty over him.  Still, year after year the Sultan made as though he were fitting out a naval force to send to Tripoli and exercise this same suzerainty by deposing the Bey; and every year our squadron used to proceed to Tunis, and stay there wasting its time while the Turkish ministry and those diplomats who were hostile to our influence amused themselves by waving the Capitan Pasha’s attack before us like a scarecrow.

This annual repetition of a sham attack by the Turkish fleet and of the sudden despatch of our squadron, and its subsequent spell of idleness in Tunisian waters, had degenerated into a farce in which the ridiculous part fell to our share.  So that when I took over the command of the squadron, with the prospect of seeing it undergo the same course of humbug again, I could not resist making some representations on the subject to M. Guizot, a resolute and large-minded man, as solicitous for his country’s honour as for his own.  That very year, as it happened, the Bey of Tunis had had to complain of intrigues and disturbances stirred up on his eastern frontier by the Turkish pasha, who was governor of Tripoli.