It was a glittering and gallant crowd that walked the quarter-deck with all the gay _abandon_ of their race those balmy, fragrant West Indian evenings of April 1782, while the band played 'Vive Henri Quatre!' and 'Charmante Gabrielle,' high spirited, and heedless of the coming days. What were they not going to do, '_pour en finir avec ces Anglais--betes_!' Jamaica first, _cela s'entend_! Then the sack of Barbados,--the spoil of the goldsmiths and silversmiths of Bridgetown and the mansions of the planters, whose sideboards, groaning under the weight of gold and silver plate, 'astonished and stirred the envy of every passing visitor,' as travellers had told ever since the time of old Pere Labat, 'gold and silver plate so abundant that the plunder of it would pay the cost of an expedition for the reduction of the island!' _Vive la France! Vive la Gloire!_ Light-hearted and gay, how many of them gave a thought to something else? What of those who would not live to see the coming battle through? How many of them all would kneel next Sunday three weeks to receive the _aumonier's_ blessing at early mass? Ah well!--what mattered it!--_Fortune de guerre!_ Perhaps so. Perhaps, indeed, better so--at any rate, for some of them. Those who were to fall in the coming fight were to be envied, rather, in their ending. It was better, surely, to go down there and then, to be dropped overboard in the clear, deep water alongside, eight hundred and fifty fathoms down, to sleep the last sleep beneath the lapping wavelets of the blue Caribbean, dead on the field of honour, than to survive for what was yet to come for France, to experience the fate that was to befall so many a gallant French officer who outlived the cannon thunders of Rodney's day. To be laid to rest there in those soft summer seas was at least a better fortune than to have to undergo the cruel doom that a few years later overtook so many of their messmates who outlasted the fight. Better be smashed in two by an English cannon-ball on the quarter-deck, than perish hideously in the dungeons of Draguignan, or go in the tumbrils to a death of ignominy and cold-blooded horror, clattering over the cobble-stones to the Place de Greve, while all round the mob of Paris howled and danced and cursed--the hapless lot of so many a gallant naval officer among the rest of the gentlemen of old-time France, ... those gallant fellows who died by guillotine, For honour and the fleur-de-lis and Antoinette the Queen.