Delayed promotion

[snopes]

I found the following in a book about the 1816 shipwreck of the French frigate Medusa, in a section detailing how, after the (second) restoration of the French monarchy, many persons were rewarded for their continued loyalty to the crown by being given important military commands, even though they had had little or no significant military experience since the beginning of the revolution twenty-five years earlier:

As a dangerous reminder of how things had turned against the liberal and republican cause at home, the crew, troops, colonists, and officers on board the flagship Medusa were to be under the command of a political appointee, the haughty Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, a rusty relic from the ancien régime who had not put to sea for about a quarter of a century. Such ill-judged appointments were a hazardous fact of the restoration as the outmoded, old aristocrats, who had remained loyal to the crown, solicited just recompense. The absurdity of their appeals is amusingly underscored by a celebrated story of a petition brought to the government by an officer of the Royal Navy who had not served since 1789. At that time, the man had been a midshipman but now demanded the rank of rear admiral, arguing that this would have been his present position had his career evolved normally. "Tell him," said the secretary of state, "that we acknowledge the logic of his reasoning, but that he forgot a key fact -- he was killed at the battle of Trafalgar."

(The footnote indicates this source of this anecdote to be Guillaume de Bertier de Sauvingy's book La Restauration (Paris: Flammarion, 1955; p. 79), which I couldn't read even if I could obtain a copy.)