The Proserpine, thanks to the builders of Toulon, was thought to be the handsomest model then afloat in the Mediterranean, and, like an established beauty, all who belonged to her were fond of decorating her and of showing her fine proportions to advantage.

As she now lay at single anchor just out of gun-shot from his own berth, Raoul could not avoid gazing at her with envy, and a bitter feeling passed through his mind when he recalled the chances of fortune and of birth, which deprived him of the hope of ever rising to the command of such a frigate, but which doomed him, seemingly, to the fate of a privateersman for life.
Nature had intended Raoul Yvard for a much higher destiny than that which apparently awaited his career.

He had come into active life with none of the advantages that accompany the accidents of birth, and at a moment in the history of his great nation when its morals and its religious sentiments had become unsettled by the violent reaction which was throwing off the abuses of centuries.

They who imagine, however, that France, as a whole, was guilty of the gross excesses that disfigured her struggles for liberty know little of the great mass of moral feeling that endured through all the abominations of the times, and mistake the crimes of a few desperate leaders and the exaggerations of misguided impulses for a radical and universal depravity.

The France of the Reign of Terror, even, has little more to answer for than the compliance which makes bodies of men the instruments of the enthusiastic, the designing, and the active--our own country often tolerating error that differs only in the degree, under the same blind submission to combinations and impulses; this very degree, to, depending more on the accidents of history and natural causes than any agencies which are to be imputed to the one party as a fault, or to the other as a merit.