BATTLE OF TIIK ALMA. 323 detaclied force of some 9000 men* which first chap. crossed the river at its nioutli was General Bouat; '. and Bouat, it seems, was an officer who earned his command by exploits against Parisians in the boulevard, the Hue St Denis, or the neighbourhood of the Nouvelle France."f* lie who commanded the 3d Division was Prince Napoleon. He who com- manded the 4th Division Avas Fore}' ; and no man could come within the principle of selection more clearly than he did, for it was he of whom I spoke when I said that he had suffered himself to be used as the assailant and thejailer of an unarmed Legis- lature. There were, besides, the Lonrmels, the Espinasses, and numbers of others, no doubt, whose names could be easily found in their Em- peror's list of worthies. Therefore it is that the part which was taken by Marshal St Arnaud and his troops in the battle of the Alma was no fair sample of wdiat could be done by a French army. It was only a sample of what a French army could manage to do when it laboured under the weight of a destiny which ordained that all its chiefs should be men chosen for their complicity in a midnight plot, or else for acts of street slaughter.| Because they had perpetrated an extensive massacre of tJieir OAvn fellow^-country- inen, there was no certainty, perhaps, that they
- One of Bosquet's brigades and the whole of the Turkish Con-
tingent, except the two battalions left to guard the baggage. t With the 33d Regiment. J Prince Napoleon's complicity was only, as I am inclined to believe, a complicity after the fact ; but it i.s, of course, clear enough that lie owed his command entirely to the Coup d'Elat.
