1.2.1-Shirley-keeldar

ClubNinetyThree: 1.2.1: Angleterre et France Mêlées
A short chapter, but I think I can dig up some things to say about it.

I sort of horribly enjoy “the pathetic distraction of the fall of the Girondins” as a descriptor. Oh dear.

We’ve moved from the wood to the sea, and from the Parisians to the Royalists. I’d rather still be hanging out with the battalion of the Bonnet-Rouge and friends, but that’s me.

This chapter is mostly about this livre’s eponymous ship, the corvette Claymore, an English ship manned by French émigrés and deserters, about to pull out of the Bonnenuit Bay of one of the channel islands.

The Claymore is a warship masquerading as a merchant ship. It is boarded by a general masquerading as a peasant.

Wow, much subtle.

In case you didn’t get it yet, the ship’s crew “understood that this peasant was no more a peasant than the warship was a merchant ship.”

Actually, it was kind of nice that we got a few paragraphs to come to the conclusion that the peasant was a fake, with the ship-metaphor in the background to help, then the mention of the knees and elbows worn out for verisimilitude, before outright slapping us in the face with it.

So, obviously our fake peasant has a Secret Mission, which if it goes as planned will wreak havoc throughout coastal France.

Except the local spy, Gélambre, is double-crossing the Royalists. He sends a dispatch to England promising that the coast will be in flames… but four days earlier he sent a warning to one of the Republicans presumably responsible for keeping an eye on the coast to specifically watch out for the ship and the fake peasant in order to have them, respectively, captured and guillotined.

Actually Gélambre apparently was once future-Charles X’s body guard, which I find entertaining, considering the whole betraying the Royalists thing. Unless of course getting the Claymore taken by Republican forces and the fake peasant guillotined, etc., is what’s going to cause the desired disaster. I don’t know anything more about Gélambre than what’s given, so I don’t know how clever to expect him to be.

I have no idea what’s going to happen! It’s so hard keeping to one chapter a day. (And I’m resisting the urge to look up too much specific historical context, because I’ve learned from reading Dumas novels that too much history going makes reading messy.)