Chapter 11 - Page 2

lay the frigate, riding on the glassy
surface of the sea, her sails furled, her yards squared, everything
about her cared for and in its place, until she formed a faultless
picture of nautical symmetry and naval propriety. There are all sorts of
men in a marine, as well as in civil life; these taking things as they
come, content to perform their duties in the most quiet manner, while
others again have some such liking for their vessels as the dandy has
for his own person, and are never happy unless embellishing them. The
truth in this, as in most other matters, lies in a medium; the officer
who thinks too much of the appearance of his vessel, seldom having mind
enough to be stow due attention on the great objects for which she was
constructed and is sailed; while, on the other hand, he who is
altogether indifferent to these appearances is usually thinking of
things foreign to his duty and his profession; if, indeed, he thinks at
all. Cuffe was near the just medium, Inclining a little too much,
perhaps, to the naval dandy. The Proserpine, thanks to the builders of
Toulon, was thought to be the handsomest model then afloat in the
Mediterranean, and, like an established beauty, all who belonged to her
were fond of decorating her and of showing her fine proportions to
advantage. As she now lay at single anchor just out of gun-shot from his
own berth, Raoul could not avoid gazing at her with envy, and a bitter
feeling passed through his mind when he recalled the chances of fortune
and of birth, which deprived him of the hope of ever rising to the
command of such a frigate, but which doomed him, seemingly, to the fate
of a privateersman for life.

Nature had intended Raoul Yvard for a much higher destiny than that
which apparently awaited his career. He had come into active life with
none of the advantages that accompany the accidents of birth, and at a
moment in the history of his great nation when its morals and its
religious sentiments had become unsettled by the violent reaction which
was throwing off the abuses of centuries. They who imagine, however,
that France, as a whole, was guilty of the gross excesses that
disfigured her struggles for liberty know little of the great mass of
moral feeling that endured through all the abominations of the times,
and mistake the crimes of a few desperate leaders and the exaggerations
of misguided impulses for a radical and universal depravity. The France
of the Reign of Terror, even, has little more to answer for than the
compliance which makes bodies of men the instruments of the
enthusiastic, the designing, and the active--our own country often
tolerating error that differs only in the degree, under the same blind
submission to combinations and impulses; this very