Our navy, brought to life again at the Battle of Navarino, sailed from the French ports lately so abandoned. The roads were covered with ships which saluted the land as they moved away. Steamboats, a new discovery of man's genius, came and went, carrying orders from one division to the other, like sirens or the aides-de-camp of the admiral. The Dauphin stood on shore, where all the population of the town and mountains had gathered. After snatching his kinsman, the King of Spain, from the hands of the revolution, he beheld the dawn of the day on which Christianity was to be delivered: could he have believed night to be so near at hand[179]? [Sidenote: The Algerian expedition.] The times were past in which Catherine de Medici begged from the Turk the investiture of the Principality of Algiers for Henry III., not yet King of Poland! Algiers was about to become our daughter and our conquest, without anybody's permission, without England's daring to prevent us from taking that "Emperor's Fort" which recalled Charles V. and the change in his fortunes[180]. [Illustration: The Princesse de Lieven.] It was a great joy and a great happiness to the assembled French spectators to greet, with Bossuet's greeting, the generous vessels, ready to break the slave's chain with their prows; a victory increased by the cry uttered by the Eagle of Meaux when he announced the future success to the Great King, as though to console him one day in his tomb for the dispersal of his dynasty: "Thou shalt yield, or fall under that victor, Algiers, rich in the spoils of Christianity. Thou saidst in thy heart of greed: "I hold the sea under my laws and the nations are my prey!' "The swiftness of thy ships gave thee confidence, but thou shalt see thyself attacked in thy walls like a ravenous bird which one hunts amid its rocks and in its nest, where it shares its booty among its young. Already thou art releasing thy slaves. Louis has shattered the irons under which thou wert loading his subjects, who are born to be free under his glorious empire. The astonished pilots cry beforehand: "'Who is like unto Tyre? And yet she kept silence in the midst of the sea[181].'" O splendid words, could you not retard the crumbling of the Throne? Nations proceed towards their destinies; like certain of Dante's shades, they cannot possibly be arrested, even in good fortune. Those vessels, which carried liberty to the seas of Numidia, were carrying away the Legitimacy; that fleet under the White Flag was the Monarchy getting under way, sailing from the ports where St. Louis embarked when Death called him to Carthage. O slaves delivered from imprisonment, they who have restored you to your native land have lost their country; they who have saved you from eternal banishment are banished. The master of that huge fleet has crossed the sea on a bark as a fugitive, and France can say to him what Cornelia said to Pompey: