Vry interesting, Imperator Rex; thanks for the link.
I'm not so sure about the description of the ship as having been part of D'Estaing's fleet. Somewhere or other, a long time ago, I read an article about the various eigheenth- and nineteenth-century French frigates named La Flore. (I wish I could find that article again; so far no luck.) It sticks in my memory that there's some controversy among the French historians about which was which, and which one that model represents. I believe one theory is that the model represents a ship that never actually got built. But I honestly don't remember.
Later edit: I found the article! I'm embarrassed to admit that it was almost literally under my nose: in the CD version of the Nautical Research Journal, Vols. 1-40. (That set of two CDs, by the way, is one of the biggest bargains in ship modeling or maritime history. It can be ordered through the Nautical Research Guild website.) A 57-year-old memory is a strange, unpredictable, and sometimes downright infuriating thing.
The article in question is in Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec. 1981), pp. 185-194. The title is "The Frigates La Flore," and the author is none other than Jean Boudriot, dean of the history of French naval architecture in the sailing ship period. I think we can believe what he says - with the obvious caveat that he, or some other historian, may have dug up some additional information about the subject in the past twenty-seven years.
He says there were four French Frigates named La Flore (five, if one counts the first one). The first was built in 1706. She was actually a "barque longue," "a type of vessel that might be considered the equivalent of a corvette," but "in the early establishments of our Navy this vessel, despite its trifling power, is called a frigate at times [pp. 185-6]."
The second Flore was built in 1728, and had a configuration that seems odd to non-French eyes: a full-length gundeck with twenty-two guns on it, four light guns on the quarterdeck, and a "half battery" of four 12-pounders amidships on a deck below the full-length one - just a few feet above the waterline. This ship ended her career as a receiving ship at Marseilles, being (apparently) broken up in 1761.
La Flore Number Three was a normal-looking frigate of twenty-six guns built in 1768, to a design by a famous naval constructor named Groignard, and remained in service until 1785. M. Boudriot describes her, and the circumstances of her design and construction, in some detail, but doesn't say much about her career beyond the fact that (p. 185) she "has a certain standing by reason of a scientifc voyage primarily devoted to the testing of marine chronometers, a cruise carried out in 1771-1772."
Number Four is, it seems, known in some French circles as "La Flore, called 'American.'" M. Boudriot says (p. 190) that "this frigate is claimed to have been a gift of the United States to France, but I venture to enter certain reservations about that assertion, because I have brought to light...the fact that on September 30, 1784 the engineers Chevillard and Penetreau drew up a document reporting on their inspection of the frigate La Flore, brought from Bordeaux to Rchefort to be sold conditionally by private parties to the King." M. Boudriot suggests that this ship may have been confused by somebody or other with "the old frigate La Vestale (1756), taken by the British in 1761, scuttled in 1780 when Rhode Island was evacuted, raised by the Americans, and sold to France." (I think this was the ship the British named Flora, which took part in the capture of the Continental Frigate Hancock in 1777. The British name would help explain the confusion. If I'm right, she was scuttled in Narragansett Bay not in 1780 but in 1778, when the Comte d'Estaing's squadron was approaching. That, I think, was the extent of the connection between any ship with a name resembling "La Flore" and the Comte d'Estaing.)
At any rate, La Flore Number Four was sold out of the French navy in 1792, placed in service by her new owner as a privateer, and captured by the British in 1798.
The fifth La Flore was built in 1804 and wrecked in 1811. That ship was the last French sailing warship to carry the name.
Now, which of these ships does the Lindberg model represent? The answer seems (though not absolutely definitively) to be: none of them.
It looks to me like the Lindberg kit and the Kennedy model were based on the same plans, which also were the basis for a famous model with the name La Flore on its transom that's in (or was as of 1981) the Musee de la Marine in Paris. (I believe a set of modern plans based on this model is among the series published by the Friends of the Musee de la Marine; my guess is that the designers of the Lindberg kit worked from those plans. I don't know how old the Kennedy model is - or where M. Malraux got it. Maybe it was also built from the Friends of the Musee de la Marine plans.) According to M. Boudriot, that model is identified as "The American La Flore," but he's established that the "American" connection is almost certainly bogus. M. Boudriot says the Musee de la Marine model doesn't match the known characteristics of either Number Four or Number Five. (The model has fifteen gunports on each side. That was highly unusual; most French frigates had, at the maximum, thirteen per side.) He spends several paragraphs establishing that the model fairly closely resembles four big French frigates, La Sylphide (1756), La Terpsichore (1763), La Renomee (1767), and L'Hebe (1757). They were the only French frigates of the period that had fifteen ports per side. But he doesn't think the modeler was trying to represent any of those ships accurately; the model lacks several distinctive features of each of them.
M. Boudriot also comments (p. 191) that "the rig seems to me later than the hull, withits mizzenyard converted into a gaff, an arrangement they commenced to adopt of vessels of low freeboard around the 1780s; perhaps there has been a restoration of this part of the rig?"
His conclusion (p. 194) is that "the model of La Flore does not represent any of the frigates which bore that name; that the model was made between 1765 and 1770; that it may have been inspired, as regards the arrangment of it armament, by the large frigates of Groignard [the designer], yet without representing any one of them; that the maker very arbitrarily called this frigate La Flore and produced a figurehead quite in harmony with that name. But was it he who took the initiative? This liberty astonishes me on the part of a man who had substantial knowledge such as attested by the realism of the model he made.
"Briefly put, this handsome model is not of Groignard's Flore [Number Three] nor of the "American" Flore, [Number Four] but what frigate does it represent? On this point the problem remains to be solved, if one supposes to begin with [the supposition] that the maker of the model did really desire to represent a quite specific frigate."
Unless somebody produces some authoritative piece of research on this subject dating from a later date than 1981, I think we can take that as the last word on it.
As I remember, the instructions in the original issue of the Lindberg kit mentioned something about the scientific voyage of 1771-1772 - the one made by La Flore Number 3. The reference to the ship represented by the Kennedy model having served with the Comte d'Estaing is simply wrong. Does any of the three models - Musee de la Marine, Kennedy Library, or Lindberg plastic kit - represent an actual ship? Probably not.
I think at least one of the notorious HECEPOB wood kit companies (Mamoli, Amati, or one of that crowd) used to make a La Flore kit. (There's none currently on the Model Expo website, which is where I usually look for info on the strange realm of the HECEPOBs.) My vague (as usual) recollection is that this kit looked remarkably like the Lindberg one. That probably means it was based on the Musee de la Marine plans. I frequently get up on my soapbox to rant at the HECEPOB companies and their frequent failure to do research, but in this case I have to go easy. It seems that, deliberately or otherwise, the builder of that old model fooled a great maritime museum, at least one other excellent modeler, two ship model kit manufacturers, Les Amis du Musee de la Marine, a French novelist, and a President of the United States. Quite an achievement.