the Manon. Three lay by the sides of men tossing upon the floor; but the last still rested upon the head of a fellow who seemed in better health than his brothers.
He was sitting up, shaky and weak, and though desperate to consume some hot broth, looked unable to hold the spoon that Mr. Hill had afforded him. I judged him to be a seaman, of perhaps fifty years or so; but whether he should be rated Ordinary or Able, I not entirely say.2 I inclined towards Able: from the
length of his hair, which was knotted in a queue that reached to the middle of his back, I suspected him of naval pride; and, of course, there was the hat, with its handsome red ribbons embroidered in blue and white. Manon.
I took bowl and spoon from the man's shaking fingers and helped him gently to eat. His jaw trembled as the broth trickled into his mouth, and he closed his eyes. “Merti, madame.”
“De rien, I replied
His eyes flew open. “Vous parlezfrancais?”
“Un pen, settlement. II y avait beaucoup de temps …”
He fluttered a thin hand in dismissal of my excuses. His red-rimmed eyes were dangerously over-bright “Avez-vous du papier?”
Did I have paper? I stared at him in consternation. I could not have understood the words correctly.
“Pour les lettres,” he insisted. “Jevoudrais écrire à Provence…”
Letters home. But of course. He was probably illiterate, and would depend upon the skill of others to despatch his intelligence to France. Somewhere in the south of that country, there might be a wife or a child—someone who could fear him dead, were it not for the arrival of a missive penned in a strange hand. A whisper of excitement rose up within me. For surely this fellow—so recently taken prisoner—must desire to relate every detail of the Manon's engagement with the British? Should he not be likely to recount, in tedious detail, the moments that led to his ship's capitulation?
“I shall find you paper,” I said without regard for French or English, and set down the man's bowl. His gaze followed me in hopeful confusion as I hurried towards Mr. Hill.
After whispered consultation, the surgeon accepted the few coins I pressed into his palm and sent an urchin to a nearby tavern. The appearance of writing materials a quarter of an hour later occasioned a surge in health, an increase of life and energy among the ailing. A few moments bent over my pen, and I was surrounded by such men as could drag themselves near to watch my hand move across the cheap foolscap. Had the supply of paper not been swiftly exhausted, I might be writing to France still. A tedious job I should have found it, for the mind of your common sailor is in general unimaginative.
The fellow whose duty I first undertook, was direct in his wording and naive in his aims. He wished only to inform a lady named Marguerite that he was alive— that he was confident he should soon be returned to Boulogne—that he desired her to remain chaste—and that she must not, on any account, sacrifice the red-backed rooster to her mania for cassoulet. I managed to convey as much of these varying sentiments as my pitiful mastery of French would allow, and then enquired: “Do you not wish to tell her anything of the engagement in which you fell prisoner? It was with the Stella Moris, was it not?”
My seaman pursed his lips and emitted a peculiarly French sound somewhere between an expectoration and a whistle, as if to say, “Tant pis. He had done with defeat; he was marshalling his strength for a return to battle; he could not reflect upon ships that were lost. Why discredit the Emperor's glory, by sending news of so ignominious an engagement? All these sentiments and some I could not fathom were contained in that single syllable, that sputum of contempt. I folded the sheet of paper in disappointment
But directly I had sealed the edges with tallow, my services were implored by others too ready to relate the particulars of the Manon's loss. And here I discovered, to my chagrin, the limits of schoolgirl French.
I had never been taught the sort of terms that might prove useful in such a pass—the French that should distinguish the differences among guns, or describe the varying weights of shot, or convey the particulars of sail and line. I struggled to decipher the full sense of vient sous le vent, which I took to