The Peace was hollow and brief, for the mastery of the sea was not yet decided, and by the middle of 1803 we find Nelson back in the Mediterranean, not blockading Toulon, but rather trying to tempt the French out to a battle. He even went so far as to appear to run away, and the French Admiral, Latouche-Treville, promptly wrote a letter giving a most glowing account of how he had chased the English away from Toulon. The idea of a Frenchman daring to say such a thing naturally made Nelson furious. Writing about it to his brother he said: “If this fleet gets fairly up with M. Latouche his letter with all his ingenuity must be different from his last. We had fancied that we had chased him into Toulon, but from the time of his meeting Captain Hawker of the _Isis_ I never heard of his acting otherwise than as a poltroon and a liar. I am keeping his letter, and if I take him by God he shall eat it.” This amiable design, however, the French Admiral baulked by dying, and when Nelson heard the news he remarked half-angrily: “He is gone, and all his lies with him.” That is what he thought of the Admiral. This is what he thought of the fleet: “The French fleet yesterday was to appearance in high feather and as fine as paint could make them. Our weather-beaten ships, I have no fear, will make their sides like a plum-pudding.” The interval between the ending of the Toulon blockade and the Battle of Trafalgar was filled chiefly by what may be described as a huge naval hunt. On the one hand, there were three French fleets manœuvring to get out and come together in the Channel with the object of overwhelming any English force that might try to prevent the embarkation of the Grand Army at Boulogne. But they had another object, and that was to get as far as possible out of Nelson’s way. The first idea was to make a feint at the West Indies, and so away went Admiral Villeneuve with his fleet across the Atlantic, and away went Nelson post-haste after him. He got to the West Indies only to find that the Frenchmen had doubled on their tracks and gone back again, and so he immediately turned the prows of his weather-beaten and almost unseaworthy ships to the eastward, and for the second time chased the French across the Atlantic. But he missed them again, and on July 20, 1805, Nelson made an entry in his diary to the effect that he had that day gone ashore at Gibraltar--the first time that he had left the _Victory_ for two years all but ten days!