This body of laws, or regulations, was very French in its completeness, its air of logical coherence, and its excessive regulation, of every detail of the service. It was contained in twenty-three books. It divided the French Navy into four branches, three civil and one military. The three civil branches, collectively known as _La Plume_, or the Pen, were divided between the purchase, manufacture, and care of materials. The administration of the dockyards was in the hands of the Pen. At the head of each dockyard was a civil officer, called the _Intendant de la marine_. The military branch, called _L’Epée_, or the Sword, consisted of the naval officers. It was entrusted with the navigation and the fighting of the ships. Under the old organisation established by Richelieu, the control of the dockyards had been given to the Sword; but Colbert, who was a civilian, and who cherished a lively jealousy of the military officers, had reversed this arrangement. The Sword was never quite reconciled to its degradation, and its feuds with the Pen went on until the French Royal Navy was destroyed by the Revolution. While Colbert lived and the king was young, the central authority was strong enough to compel obedience, but in later years all the parade of precision in the language of the _Ordonnance_, and all the power of the king, could not keep the civil and military officials from quarrelling, from disobeying orders, and disputing the meaning of the most exactly worded regulations. The head of the Sword was naturally the Admiral of France, who was a member of the royal family, and except in the case of the Count of Toulouse, a dignified figurehead, and not an effective chief. His administrative work was done by the Minister of Marine and the Council. Next to the Admiral came the two Vice-Admirals, _Du Levant_ the Mediterranean, and _Du Ponant_ the Ocean, who commanded in chief when he was absent, each in his own sea. The next rank was that of Lieutenant-General. We may say for purposes of comparison that the Admiral of France answered to our Lord High Admiral, and the Vice-Admirals to our Admirals, while the Lieutenants-General answered to our Vice-Admirals. Next came an officer happily unparalleled in our service. This was the _Intendant des armées navales_, who is not to be confounded with the _Intendant de marine_. He was a civilian who accompanied every French squadron, and had supreme authority over the _Commissaires_, or Pursers, and the civil work in all its branches. But he had also a right to sit on councils of war, and was authorised to report on the behaviour of the naval chief in action. The _Intendant des armées navales_ was in fact a French equivalent for the Dutch Field Deputies, and he acted in exactly the same way, by hampering the fighting chief when he was an energetic man, and by reducing him to submission when he was a weak one, and of course by irritating and exaggerating the jealousies of the Pen and the Sword. He was a spy