The army left Constantine in two detachments.  I returned with the second, which escorted the general in command, who had fallen sick, and an enormous convoy of fever patients and cripples of all sorts.  It was a dreary journey back, for the column was decimated by cholera, and the road was strewed with corpses.  Every minute soldiers were to be seen dropping their muskets and writhing in the most awful convulsions.  My brother, who commanded the rear-guard, spent his whole time having the poor wretches picked up and tied into mule litters.  They were thence drafted into the ambulance wagons, which were crowded already, and there they died like flies.  As soon as a man died, the other occupants of the wagon united their efforts and heaved him overboard.  When the convoy started every morning a row of corpses marked the spot the wagons had been on during the night.  A detachment of engineers covered them over with a little soil, but we had hardly moved off before the Arabs swooped down from all directions and uncovered and stripped them.

I was ill myself by the time the columns got to Bona—­fever had me in its grip, but thanks to severe physicking I was almost my own man again by the time I rejoined my ship at Algiers.  She went to sea almost at once.  I had a relapse at Senegal, but the ocean passage completely cured me, and I was quite in smooth water by the time we reached the South American coast.  Rio de Janeiro was our first port.  I need not enlarge on the magnificent view presented by the Bay of Rio, which has been so frequently described by travellers.  It was during this stay in harbour that I first saw the young princess who was later to become the Princess de Joinville, the devoted companion of my whole life.  During this stay, too, I made an expedition to Minas, the gold mine country, a long journey on mule-back, through the magnificent monotony of the virgin forest.  One of the mines I went to see, called Gongo-Soco, was worked by the labour of four hundred slaves, and owned by an English company who made an enormous profit out of it.  I went down it, and, under the guidance of some Cornish miners, I had a try with a pick and succeeded in getting out several nuggets as thick as my little finger.  As the vein was principally manganese, we were black all over when we came out of the mine, but a body of negresses came at once to wash us.  Another expedition I made into the “camp” initiated me into a sort of sport which was new to me—­hunting wild horses with a lasso.  After having admired the extraordinary skill of the camperos in doing this, I tried it myself, and that not altogether unsuccessfully—­it is a fascinating occupation.

To finish up our stay at Rio, we gave the emperor and his family, and the whole of society both foreign and Brazilian, a ball on board our ship.  Towards the end of the evening, I turned a young lion I had been given in Senegal loose in the ball-room, and his appearance somewhat disturbed the figures of the cotillon.