While at the school, the young duke had been provided with a guide, philosopher, and friend, in the person of an accomplished ex-officer of the French navy, who had been obliged to quit that service, under the Empire, because of his attachment to the exiled monarchy. I knew this gentleman very well at Newport, exchanging with him occasional visits, though he was much my senior in years. His name was Fauvel, which the midshipmen, or other, had promptly Anglicized into Four Bells--a nautical hour-stroke. I suppose this propensity to travesty foreign or difficult names is not merely maritime; but naturally enough my reading has brought me more in contact with it in connection with naval matters. Thus the _Ville de Milan_, captured into the British service, became to their seamen the "Wheel 'em along;" and the _Bellerophon_, originally their own, is historically reported to have passed current as the "Bully Ruffian." Captain Fauvel accompanied us in the _Macedonian_; but after arriving in England, as we were to go to Cherbourg, his charge and he left us, neither being _persona grata_ at that date in a French harbor. When we reached Cherbourg, Fauvel's wife was there, either resident or for the moment, and at our captain's invitation visited the ship to see where her husband had been living, and would again be when we reached a more friendly port. As contrary luck would have it, while she was on board, the French admiral and the general commanding the troops came alongside to return the official call paid them. The awkwardness, of course, was merely that her presence obtruded the fact, otherwise easily and discreetly ignored, that when out of French waters we were hospitably entertaining persons politically distasteful to the French government, the courtesies of which we were now accepting; and there was a momentary impulse to keep her out of sight. A better judgment prevailed, however, and a very courteous exchange of French politeness ensued between the officials and the lady, to whom doubtless political significance attached. A more notable circumstance, in the light of the then future, was that during our few days in Cherbourg arrived the news of the capture of the city of Mexico by the French troops; and before our departure took place the official celebration, with flags and salutes, of that crowning event in an enterprise which in the end proved disastrous to its originator, and fatal to his protege, Maximilian.