At Gibraltar the _Temeraire_ was patched up and refitted sufficiently to enable her to proceed to England under sail. The _Victory_ had arrived four days before, and was lying at anchor with Nelson's flag and her ensign at half-mast, as were the other ships of the fleet, upwards of a dozen, that had as yet come in. Four days afterwards the _Euryalus_, from which Admiral Collingwood had removed into the _Queen_, sailed for England, carrying on board Collingwood's completed Trafalgar despatch,[114] the captured French and Spanish ensigns (to be hung up in St. Paul's and left there to perish through neglect), and Admiral Villeneuve himself, going to meet his doom. Within six months the hapless French Admiral was dead--by his own hand. The story, so long believed in England, that Admiral Villeneuve's death was another foul murder to be charged against Napoleon has every probability against it. Paroled on his arrival at Spithead, and exchanged on the usual terms, Villeneuve had landed at Morlaix in Brittany, and was on his way to report himself in Paris, when one evening a sealed letter from the Minister of Marine was handed to him. Next morning he was found in his bedroom at the inn where he had put up, stabbed to the heart. A letter taking leave of his wife was found in the room. He was buried that night without any honours. [Illustration: VILLENEUVE'S SIGNATURE] Poor Villeneuve! It was a pitiful and hapless closing to a career that had opened with such bright promise for a certain young _garde de la Marine_ on the quarter-deck of De Suffren's _Heros_[115]; a sad, unworthy ending for one in whose veins ran the blood of eight-and-twenty knights of St. Louis, St. Esprit, and St. Michel; for one who in his own right was of the highest of the old _noblesse_ of Royal France, for a member of a House that had given one of the most famous of Grand Masters to the Order, and a Saint and ten Bishops to the Church.[116] Poor Villeneuve!--where moulders his unhappy dust? The summer visitor from England, at the price of a cheap ticket, may see where the poor remains of the vanquished of Trafalgar rest to-day--if, that is, he can find the place. Beneath no storied monument is it, among his country's greater dead; not in the vault of the Villeneuves where his high-born kinsmen sleep:--not there. In a forgotten spot in the old burial-ground at distant Rennes, a Provencal he among stranger Bretons, the most luckless of his line lies there in a suicide's desolate grave. And it is all the more pitiful too, when one thinks of our own Trafalgar chiefs laid to their rest together in honour in St. Paul's. Side by side in the vaulted crypt beneath the Cathedral dome rest our three Trafalgar admirals in honour evermore. Brothers-in-arms in life, like brothers in death they lie; till, pealing out on land and sea, the dread Archangel's trump shall sound their final call to quarters. Poor Villeneuve! What a contrast!