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Whilst Pitt kept his answer waiting, an English squadron blockaded Belle-Isle, and the governor, M. de Sainte-Croix, left without relief, was forced to capitulate after an heroic resistance. When the conditions demanded by England were at last transmitted to Versailles, the English flag was floating over the citadel of Belle-Isle, the mouth of the Loire and of the Vilaine was blockaded.
Finding himself at once pursued by the English squadron, he sought shelter in the difficult channels at the mouth of the Vilaine. The English dashed in after him. A partial engagement, which ensued, was unfavorable; and the commander of the French rear-guard, M. St. Andre du Verger, allowed himself to be knocked to pieces by the enemy's guns in order to cover the retreat.
But the desires and the hopes of selfish ambition reappeared before long more prominently than these honest effusions of feeling. "All!" said the Duke of Berry, "De Clisson, La Mviere, Noviant, and Vilaine have been haughty and harsh towards me; the time has come when I shall pay them out in the same coin from the same mint."
The admiral ran ashore in the Bay of Le Croisic and burned his own vessel; seven ships remained blockaded in the Vilaine. M. de Conflans' job, as the sailors called it at the time, was equivalent to a battle lost without the chances and the honor of the struggle. The English navy was triumphant on every sea, and even in French waters.
The day is drawing to a close; they reach their goal, a miserable, grey, draggled town at the mouth of the Vilaine, and are roughly brought before the arbiter of their lives Thureau himself, the monstrous excrescence of the times, who, like Marat and Carrier, sees nothing in the new freedom but a free opening for the lowest instincts of ferocity.
Alluding in after days to his experiences on this journey, the great man said that the earth, as seen by him from the car of the balloon, looked like a huge carpet woven chance-wise with different coloured wools. It did not impress him at all, he added, as it was really nothing but "une vilaine chinoiserie."
The continuing violence of the wind, and ignorance of the ground, prevented approach within gun-shot to the ships at the mouth of the Vilaine, while they, by lightening and favor of the next flood tide, warped their way inside through the mud flats. Hawke remained nearly two months longer, returning to England January 17, 1760.
"There the current of the Vilaine throws them upon another isle, the Isle of Hoedic." "I agree with that." "Well, monsieur, from that isle to Belle-Isle the way is quite straight. The sea, broken both above and below, passes like a canal like a mirror between the two isles; the chalands glide along upon it like ducks upon the Loire; that's how it is."
And Marsac, if I remember rightly, is not far from Rennes, on the Vilaine? I answered that it was, adding, with a full heart, that it grieved me to be compelled to receive so great a prince in so poor a lodging. 'Well, I confess, Du Mornay struck in, looking carelessly round him, 'you have a queer taste, M. de Marsac, in the arrangement of your furniture. You 'Mornay! the king cried sharply.
On such a boisterous day as this, some nineteen years before, by the sandy mouth of the river Vilaine, on the confines of Brittany and Vendée had Adrian Landale been drowned; under such a sky, and under the buffets of such an angry wind had he been recalled to life, and in the interval, he had seen the same pictures which now, coursing back many years in a few seconds, passed before his inward vision.
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