to the custody of the British. and though his account insinuates that he was on a boat close to Vengeur when she foundered, he was actually dining in the mess of Culloden at the moment of the sinking. In 1795, Loutherbourg depicted the rescue of Vengeurs crew by British ships in his large canvas of the battle, Lord Howe's action, or the Glorious First of June. Contemporary reactions in France The speech of 9 July by Barère at the National Convention inflamed the nation, and as it specifically encouraged artists to exalt the story, poets like Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun and Marie-Joseph Chénier composed eulogies to commemorate the event, wrote new words for existing songs, and even produced a three-act opera. Barère had the following decree passed at the National Convention on 21 June 1794: The reappearance of the purportedly sunk crew, and the Thermidorian Reaction, prevented the completion of this programme. Captain Renaudin was posthumously promoted to contre-amiral on 29 August 1794; he was later exchanged for the captain of HMS Thames, Captain James Cotes. On 10 September 1794, Jean-Jacques Bréard declared before the Convention: In spite of these facts, the myth lived on: in his Histoire de la révolution française, Adolphe Thiers wrote an account repeating Barère's version, where Vengeur refused to surrender. In 1847 Alphonse de Lamartine even invented the story that Renaudin had been killed heroically, cut in half by a cannon shot like Dupetit-Thouars. Some reports however indicate that the legend was not seriously accepted: Carlyle suggests one near-eyewitness French account amounted to "not a recantation of an impudent amazing falsehood, but to some vague faint murmur or whimper of admission that it is probably false". Captain Diaz de Soria relates the story, probably apocryphal, that in 1840, the Prince of Joinville, while decorating the purported last survivor of Vengeur, would have told him "we do this for the legend, my good man: nations, after all, live only of legends". In 1857, Guérin wrote "one wonders how, after that, history could remain so credulous"."On se demande comment, après cela, l'histoire a pu rester si crédule". By "that" ("cela"), Guérin refers to the reappearance of the crew of Vengeur, reported sunk with their ship. Jules Verne's depiction In Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea, published in 1870, Jules Verne reported the incident with its revolutionary slant: Models At least two models of Vengeur du Peuple are