The Second Funeral of Napoleon
Page: 18

look at than their commander. A more clean, smart, active, well-
limbed set of lads never "did dance" upon the deck of the famed
"Belle Poule" in the days of her memorable combat with the "Saucy
Arethusa." "These five hundred sailors," says a French newspaper,
speaking of them in the proper French way, "sword in hand, in the
severe costume of board-ship (la severe tenue du bord), seemed proud
of the mission that they had just accomplished. Their blue jackets,
their red cravats, the turned-down collars of blue shirts edged with
white, ABOVE ALL their resolute appearance and martial air, gave a
favorable specimen of the present state of our marine--a marine of
which so much might be expected and from which so little has been
required."--Le Commerce: 16th December.

There they were, sure enough; a cutlass upon one hip, a pistol on
the other--a gallant set of young men indeed. I doubt, to be sure,
whether the severe tenue du bord requires that the seaman should be
always furnished with those ferocious weapons, which in sundry
maritime manoeuvers, such as going to sleep in your hammock for
instance, or twinkling a binnacle, or luffing a marlinspike, or
keelhauling a maintopgallant (all naval operations, my dear, which
any seafaring novelist will explain to you)--I doubt, I say, whether
these weapons are ALWAYS worn by sailors, and have heard that they
are commonly and very sensibly too, locked up until they are wanted.
Take another example: suppose artillerymen were incessantly
compelled to walk about with a pyramid of twenty-four pound shot in
one pocket, a lighted fuse and a few barrels of gunpowder in the
other--these objects would, as you may imagine, greatly inconvenience
the artilleryman in his peaceful state.

The newspaper writer is therefore most likely mistaken in saying
that the seamen were in the severe tenue du bord, or by "bord"
meaning "abordage"--which operation they were not, in a harmless
church, hung round with velvet and wax-candles, and filled with
ladies, surely called upon to perform. Nor indeed can it be
reasonably supposed that the picked men of the crack frigate of the