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EVEN the patriotic Frenchman does not always realize how long is the list of his naval heroes. He is often content to name Duquesne, Duguay-Trouin, and Jean Bart, and to suppose that the list is complete. There is a host of others who should not be forgotten. Among them is Jean Bernard Louis Desjeans, Baron de Pointis, whose daring exploits have suffered eclipse bn account of the failures of the French navy toward the close of the reign of Louis XIV. Yet one of his expeditions played for a year a determining r6le in the maneuvers of the navies of England, France, and Holland, greatly alarmed both Spanish America and the English West Indies, influenced somewhat the course of peace negotiations at Ryswick, and materially increased English interest in the South Seas at the moment when the future of the Spanish empire became the predominant issue in European diplomacy. Le Siecle de Lottis Quatorze still stands resplendent for its wars and rumors of wars. It has, indeed, been generally assumed that this king was too deeply engrossed in military affairs to be interested in commerce and colonization, and that while he cherished the army he starved the navy. He was, however, deeply concerned about naval affairs, commerce, and colonies, as even a casual reference to the manuscripts and printed sources of the reign will indicate. Some have claimed that the attention paid to them was due to Colbert, but the emphasis on all three increased after his death, and was largely responsible for plunging France into three-quarters of a century of bitter, if intermittent, warfare which began with the accession of William III. to the English throne, and ended in I763 only after it had spread from Havana to Manila. The career of Pointis is a commentary upon this paragraph, and particularly is this true of his capture of Cartagena, the exploit for which he should best be remembered. He was born in I645. By the age of forty he had risen in the navy to be captain of a royal vessel. Soon after, he was made commissary general of marines and a chevalier of the Order of St. Louis. At Beachy Head in I690 he commanded a ship of the line. After the battle of La Hogue two years later, when Louis XIV. began gradually (more gradually, indeed, than has usually 237

R EADERS of Nathaniel Hawthorne's romances have long been familiar with his method of "mixing" fact and fiction, in carefully selected portions, to create scenes and characters for his novels. These scenes and characters are, he says, always "of his own making, or, at all events, of his own mixing." 1 Again and again, jottings or fully expanded paragraphs from his notebooks make their reappearance in his novels, none of which provides more scope for speculation concerning this practice than does The House of the Seven Gables.