Volume VI Part 8 (1/2)

The dismay at Versailles was great, and prevailed over the astonishment.

There had never been any confidence in Dupleix's projects, there had been scarcely any belief in his conquests. The soft-hearted inertness of ministers and courtiers was almost as much disgusted at the successes as at the defeats of the bold adventurers who were attempting and risking all for the aggrandizement and puissance of France in the East. Dupleix secretly received notice to demand his recall. He replied by proposing to have M. de Bussy nominated in his place. ”Never was so grand a fellow as this Bussy,” he wrote. The ministers and the Company cared little for the grandeur of Bussy or of Dupleix; what they sought was a dastardly security, incessantly troubled by the enterprises of the politician and the soldier. The tone of England was more haughty than ever, in consequence of Clive's successes. The recall of Dupleix was determined upon.

The Governor of Pondicherry had received no troops, but he had managed to reorganize an army, and had resumed the offensive in the Carnatic; Bussy, set free at last as to his movements in the Deccan, was preparing to rejoin Dupleix. Clive was ill, and had just set out for England: fortune had once more changed front. The open conferences held with Saunders, English Governor of Madras, failed in the month of January, 1754; Dupleix wished to preserve the advantages he had won; Saunders refused to listen to that. The approach of a French squadron was signalled; the s.h.i.+ps appeared to be numerous. Dupleix was already rejoicing at the arrival of unexpected aid, when, instead of an officer commanding the twelve hundred soldiers from France, he saw the apparition of M. G.o.deheu, one of the directors of the Company, and but lately his friend and correspondent.

”I come to supersede you, sir,” said the new arrival, without any circ.u.mstance; ”I have full powers from the Company to treat with the English.” The cabinet of London had not been deceived as to the importance of Dupleix in India; his recall had been made the absolute condition of a cessation of hostilities. Louis XV. and his ministers had shown no opposition; the treaty was soon concluded, restoring the possessions of the two Companies within the limits they had occupied before the war of the Carnatic, with the exception of the district of Masulipatam, which became accessible to the English. All the territories ceded by the Hindoo princes to Dupleix reverted to their former masters; the two Companies interdicted one another from taking any part in the interior policy of India, and at the same time forbade their agents to accept from the Hindoo princes any charge, honor, or dignity; the most perfect equality was re-established between the possessions and revenues of the two great European nations, rivals in the East as well as in Europe; England gave up some petty forts, some towns of no importance, France ceded the empire of India. When G.o.deheu signed the treaty, Trichinopoli was at last on the point of giving in. Bussy was furious, and would have quitted the Deccan, which he still occupied, but Dupleix constrained him to remain there; he himself embarked for France with his wife and daughter, leaving in India, together with his life's work destroyed in a few days by the poltroonery of his country's government, the fortune he had acquired during his great enterprises, entirely sunk as it was in the service of France; the revenues destined to cover his advances were seized by G.o.deheu.

France seemed to comprehend what her ministers had not even an idea of; Dupleix's arrival in France was a veritable triumph. It was by this time known that the reverses which had caused so much talk had been half repaired. It was by this time guessed how infinite were the resources of that empire of India, so lightly and mean-spiritedly abandoned to the English. ”My wife and I dare not appear in the streets of Lorient,”

wrote Dupleix, ”because of the crowd of people wanting to see us and bless us;” the comptroller-general, Herault de Sech.e.l.les, as well as the king and Madame de Pompadour, then and for a long while the reigning favorite, gave so favorable a reception to the hero of India that Dupleix, always an optimist, conceived fresh hopes. ”I shall regain my property here,” he would say, ”and India will recover in the hands of Bussy.”

He was mistaken about the justice as he had been about the discernment and the boldness of the French government; not a promise was accomplished; not a hope was realized; after delay upon delay, excuse upon excuse, Dupleix saw his wife expire at the end of two years, worn out with suffering and driven to despair; like her, his daughter, affianced for a long time past to Bussy, succ.u.mbed beneath the weight of sorrow; in vain did Dupleix tire out the ministers with his views and his projects for India; he saw even the action he was about to bring against the Company vetoed by order of the king. Persecuted by his creditors, overwhelmed with regret for the relatives and friends whom he had involvedin his enterprises and in his ruin, he exclaimed a few months before his death, ”I have sacrificed youth, fortune, life, in order to load with honor and riches those of my own nation in Asia. Unhappy friends, too weakly credulous relatives, virtuous citizens, have dedicated their property to promoting the success of my projects; they are now in want. . . . I demand, like the humblest of creditors, that which is my due; my services are all stuff, my demand is ridiculous, I am treated like the vilest of men. The little I have left is seized, I have been obliged to get execution stayed to prevent my being dragged to prison!” Dupleix died at last on the 11th of November, 1763, the most striking, without being the last or the most tragical, victim of the great French enterprises in India.

Despite the treaty of peace, hostilities had never really ceased in India. Clive had returned from England; freed henceforth from the influence, the intrigues, and the indomitable energy of Dupleix, he had soon made himself master of the whole of Bengal, he had even driven the French from Chandernuggur; Bussy had been unable to check his successes; he avenged himself by wresting away from the English all their agencies on the coast of Orissa, and closing against them the road between the Coromandel coast and Bengal.

Meanwhile the Seven Years' War had broken out; the whole of Europe had joined in the contest; the French navy, still feeble in spite of the efforts that had been made to restore it, underwent serious reverses on every sea. Count Lally-Tollendal, descended from an Irish family which took refuge in France with James II., went to Count d'Argenson, still minister of war, with a proposition to go and humble in India that English power which had been imprudently left to grow up without hinderance. M. de Lally had served with renown in the wars of Germany; he had seconded Prince Charles Edward in his brave and yet frivolous attempt upon England. The directors of the India Company went and asked M. d'Argenson to intrust to General Lally the king's troops promised for the expedition. ”You are wrong,” M. d'Argenson said to them; ”I know M.

de Lally; he is a friend of mine, but he is violent, pa.s.sionate, inflexible as to discipline; he will not tolerate any disorder; you will be setting fire to your warehouses, if you send him thither.” The directors, however, insisted, and M. de Lally set out on the 2d of May, 1757, with four s.h.i.+ps and a body of troops. Some young officers belonging to the greatest houses of France served on his staff.

M. de Lally's pa.s.sage was a long one; the English re-enforcements had preceded, him by six weeks. On arriving in India, he found the a.r.s.enals and the magazines empty; the establishment of Pondicherry alone confessed to fourteen millions of debt. Meanwhile the enemy was pressing at all points upon the French possessions. Lally marched to Gondelour (_Kaddaloue_), which he carried on the sixth day; he, shortly afterwards, invested Fort St. David, the most formidable of the English fortresses in India. The first a.s.sault was repulsed; the general had neither cannon nor beasts of burden to draw them. He hurried off to Pondicherry and had the natives harnessed to the artillery trains, taking pellmell such men as fell in his way, without regard for rank or caste, imprudently wounding the prejudices most dear to the country he had come to govern.

Fort St. David was taken and razed. Devicotah, after scarcely the ghost of a siege, opened its gates. Lally had been hardly a month in India, and he had already driven the English from the southern coast of the Coromandel. ”All my policy is in these five words, but they are binding as an oath--No English in the peninsula,” wrote the general. He had sent Bussy orders to come and join him in order to attack Madras.

The brilliant courage and heroic ardor of M. de Lally had triumphed over the first obstacles; his recklessness, his severity, his pa.s.sionateness were about to lose him the fruits of his victories. ”The commission I hold,” he wrote to the directors of the Company at Paris, ”imports that I shall be held in horror by all the people of the country.” By his personal defaults he aggravated his already critical position. The supineness of the French government had made fatal progress amongst its servants; Count d'Ache, who commanded the fleet, had refused to second the attempt upon Madras; twice, whilst cruising in Indian waters, the French admiral had been beaten by the English; he took the course back to Ile de France, where he reckoned upon wintering. Pondicherry was threatened, and Lally found himself in Tanjore, where he had hoped to recover a considerable sum due to the Company; on his road he had attacked a paG.o.da, thinking he would find there a great deal of treasure, but the idols were hollow and of worthless material. The paG.o.da was in flames, the disconsolate Brahmins were still wandering round about their temple; the general took them for spies, and had them tied to the cannons' mouths. The danger of Pondicherry forced M. de Lally to raise the siege of Tanjore; the English fell back on Madras.

Disorder was at its height in the Company's affairs; the vast enterprises commenced by Dupleix required success and conquests, but they had been abandoned since his recall, not without having ingulfed, together with his private fortune, a portion of the Company's resources. Lally was angered at being every moment shackled for want of money; he attributed it not only to the ill will, but also to the dishonesty, of the local authorities. He wrote, in 1758, to M. de Leyrit, Governor of Pondicherry, ”Sir, this letter shall be an eternal secret between you and me, if you furnish me with the means of terminating my enterprise. I left you a hundred thousand livres of my own money to help you to meet the expenditure it requires. I have not found so much as a hundred sous in your purse and in that of all your council; you have both of you refused to let me employ your credit. I, however, consider you to be all of you under more obligation to the Company than I am, who have unfortunately the honor of no further acquaintance with it than to the extent of having lost half my property by it in 1720. If you continue to leave me in want of everything and exposed to the necessity of presenting a front to the general discontent, not only shall I inform the king and the Company of the fine zeal testified for their service by their employees here, but I shall take effectual measures for not being at the mercy, during the short stay I desire to make in this country, of the party spirit and personal motives by which I see that every member appears to be actuated to the risk of the Company in general.”

In the midst of this distress, and in spite of this ebullition, M. de Lally led his troops up in front of Madras; he made himself master of the Black Town. ”The immense plunder taken by the troops,” says the journal of an officer who held a command under Count Lally, ”had introduced abundance amongst them. Huge stores of strong liquors led to drunkenness and all the evils it generates. The situation must have been seen to be believed. The works, the guards in the trenches were all performed by drunken men. The regiment of Lorraine alone was exempt from this plague, but the other corps surpa.s.sed one another. Hence scenes of the most shameful kind and most destructive of subordination and discipline, the details of which confined within the limits of the most scrupulous truthfulness would appear a monstrous exaggeration.” Lally in despair wrote to his friends in France, ”h.e.l.l vomited me into this land of iniquities, and I am waiting, like Jonah, for the whale that shall receive me in its belly.”

The attack on the White Town and on Fort St. George was repulsed; and on the 18th of February, 1759, Lally was obliged to raise the siege of Madras. The discord which reigned in the army as well as amongst the civil functionaries was nowhere more flagrant than between Lally and Bussy. The latter could not console himself for having been forced to leave the Deccan in the feeble bands of the Marquis of Conflans. An expedition attempted against the fortress of Wandiwash, of which the English had obtained possession, was followed by a serious defeat; Colonel Coote was master of Karikal. Little by little the French army and French power in India found themselves cooped within the immediate territory of Pondicherry. The English marched against this town. Lally shut himself up there in the month of March, 1760. Bussy had been made prisoner, and Coote had sent him to Europe. ”At the head of the French army Bussy would be in a position by himself alone to prolong the war for ten years,” said the Hindoos. On the 27th of November, the siege of Pondicherry was transformed into an investment. Lally had taken all the precautions of a good general, but he had taken them with his usual harshness; he had driven from the city all the useless mouths; fourteen hundred Hindoos, old men, women, and children, wandered for a week between the English camp and the ramparts of the town, dying of hunger and misery, without Lally's consenting to receive them back into the place; the English at last allowed them to pa.s.s. The most severe requisitions had been ordered to be made on all the houses of Pondicherry, and the irritation was extreme; the heroic despair of M. de Lally was continually wringing from him imprudent expressions. ”I would rather go and command a set of Caffres than remain in this Sodom, which the English fire, in default of Heaven's, must sooner or later destroy,”

had for a long time past been a common expression of the general's, whose fate was henceforth bound up with that of Pondicherry.

He held out for six weeks, in spite of famine, want of money, and ever-increasing dissensions. A tempest had caused great havoc to the English squadron which was out at sea; Lally was waiting and waiting for the arrival of M. d'Ache with the fleet which had but lately sought refuge at Ile de France after a fresh reverse. From Paris, on the report of an attack projected by the--English against Bourbon and Ile de France, ministers had given orders to M. d'Ache not to quit those waters. Lally and Pondicherry waited in vain.

It became necessary to surrender; the council of the Company called upon the general to capitulate; Lally claimed the honors of war, but Coote would have the town at discretion; the distress was extreme as well as the irritation. Pondicherry was delivered up to the conquerors on the 16th of January, 1761; the fortifications and magazines were razed; French power in India, long supported by the courage or ability of a few men, was foundering, never to rise again. ”n.o.body can have a higher opinion than I of M. de Lally,” wrote Colonel Coote; ”he struggled against obstacles that I considered insurmountable, and triumphed over them. There is not in India another man who could have so long kept an army standing without pay and without resources in any direction.”

”A convincing proof of his merits,” said another English officer, ”is his long and vigorous resistance in a place in which he was universally detested.”

[Ill.u.s.tration: Lally at Pondicherry----184]

Hatred bears bitterer fruits than is imagined even by those who provoke it. The animosity which M. de Lally had excited in India was everywhere an obstacle to the defence; and it was destined to cost him his life and imperil his honor. Scarcely had he arrived in England, ill, exhausted by sufferings and fatigue, followed even in his captivity by the reproaches and anger of his comrades in misfortune, when be heard of the outbreak of public opinion against him in France; he was accused of treason; and he obtained from the English cabinet permission to repair to Paris.

”I bring hither my head and my innocence,” he wrote, on disembarking, to the minister of war, and he went voluntarily to imprisonment in the Bastille. There he remained nineteen months without being examined.

When the trial commenced in December, 1764, the heads of accusation amounted to one hundred and sixty, the number of witnesses to nearly two hundred; the matter lasted a year and a half, conducted with violence on the part of M. de Lally's numerous enemies, with inveteracy on the part of the Parliament, still at strife with the government, with courage and firmness on the part of the accused. He claimed the jurisdiction of a court-martial, but his demand was rejected; when he saw himself confronted with the dock, the general suddenly uncovered his whitened head and his breast covered with scars, exclaiming, ”So this is the reward for fifty years' service!” On the 6th of May, 1766, his sentence was at last p.r.o.nounced. Lally was acquitted on the charges of high treason and malversation; he was found ”guilty of violence, abuse of authority, vexations and exactions, as well as of having betrayed the interests of the king and of the Company.” When the sentence was being read out to the condemned, ”Cut it short, sir,” said the count to the clerk come to the conclusions.” At the words ”betrayed the interests of the king,” Lally drew himself up to his full height, exclaiming, ”Never, never!” He was expending his wrath in insults heaped upon his enemies, when, suddenly drawing from his pocket a pair of mathematical compa.s.ses, he struck it violently against his heart; the wound did not go deep enough; M. de Lally was destined to drink to the dregs the cup of man's injustice.

On the 9th of May, at the close of the day, the valiant general whose heroic resistance had astounded all India, mounted the scaffold on the Place de Greve, nor was permission granted to the few friends who remained faithful to him to accompany him to the place of execution; there was only the parish priest of St. Louis en l'Ile at his side; as apprehensions were felt of violence and insult on the part of the condemned, he was gagged like the lowest criminal when he resolutely mounted the fatal ladder; he knelt without a.s.sistance, and calmly awaited his death-blow. ”Everybody,” observed D'Alembert, expressing by that cruel saying the violence of public feeling against the condemned, ”everybody, except the hangman, has a right to kill Lally.” Voltaire's judgment, after the subsidence of pa.s.sion and after the light thrown by subsequent events upon the state of French affairs in India before Lally's campaigns, is more just. ”It was a murder committed with the sword of justice.” King Louis XV. and his government had lost India; the rage and shame blindly excited amongst the nation by this disaster had been visited upon the head of the unhappy general who had been last vanquished in defending the remnants of French power. The English were masters forever of India when the son of M. de Lally-Tollendal at last obtained, in 1780, the rehabilitation of his father's memory. Public opinion had not waited till then to decide the case between the condemned and his accusers.

Whilst the French power in India, after having for an instant had the dominion over nearly the whole peninsula, was dying out beneath the incapacity and feebleness of its government, at the moment when the heroic efforts of La Bourdonnais, Dupleix, and Lally were pa.s.sing into the domain of history, a people decimated by war and famine, exhausted by a twenty years' unequal struggle, was slowly expiring, preserving to the very last its hopes and its patriotic devotion. In the West Indies the whole Canadian people were still maintaining, for the honor of France, that flag which had just been allowed to slip from the desperate hands of Lally in the East. In this case, there were no enchanting prospects of power and riches easily acquired, of dominion over opulent princes and submissive slaves; nothing but a constant struggle against nature, still mistress of the vast solitudes, against vigilant rivals and a courageous and cruel race of natives. The history of the French colonists in Canada showed traits and presented characteristics rare in French annals; the ardor of the French nature and the suavity of French manners seemed to be combined with the stronger virtues of the people of the north; everywhere, amongst the bold pioneers of civilization in the new world, the French marched in the first rank without ever permitting themselves to be surpa.s.sed by the intrepidity or perseverance of the Anglo-Saxons, down to the day when, cooped up within the first confines of their conquests, fighting for life and liberty, the Canadians defended foot to foot the honor of their mother-country, which had for a long while neglected them, and at last abandoned them, under the pressure of a disastrous war conducted by a government as incapable as it was corrupt.

For a long time past the French had directed towards America their ardent spirit of enterprise; in the fifteenth century, on the morrow of the discovery of the new world, when the indomitable genius and religious faith of Christopher Columbus had just opened a new path to inquiring minds and daring spirits, the Basques, the Bretons, and the Normans were amongst the first to follow the road he had marked out; their light barks and their intrepid navigators were soon known among the fisheries of Newfoundland and the Canadian coast. As early as 1506 a chart of the St.

Lawrence was drawn by John-Denis, who came from Honfleur in Normandy.

Before long the fishers began to approach the coasts, attracted by the fur-trade; they entered into relations with the native tribes, buying, very often for a mere song, the produce of their hunting, and , introducing to them, together with the first fruits of civilization, its corruptions and its dangers. Before long the savages of America became acquainted with the fire-water.

Policy was not slow to second the bold enterprises of the navigators.

France was at that time agitated by various earnest and mighty pa.s.sions; for a moment the Reformation, personified by the austere virtues and grand spirit of Coligny, had seemed to dispute the empire of the Catholic church. The forecasts of the admiral became more and more sombre every day; he weighed the power and hatred of the Guises as well as of their partisans; in his anxiety for his countrymen and his religion he determined to secure for the persecuted Protestants a refuge, perhaps a home, in the new world, after that defeat of which he already saw a glimmer.

A first expedition had failed, after an attempt on the coasts of Brazil; in 1562, a new flotilla set out from Havre, commanded by John Ribaut of Dieppe. A landing was effected in a beautiful country, sparkling with flowers and verdure; the century-old trees, the vast forests, the unknown birds, the game, which appeared at the entrance of the glades and stood still fearlessly at the unwonted apparition of man--this spectacle, familiar and at the same time new, presented by nature at the commencement of May, caused great joy and profound grat.i.tude amongst the French, who had come so far, through so many perils, to the borders of Florida; they knelt down piously to thank G.o.d; the savages, flocking together upon the sh.o.r.e, regarded them with astonishment mingled with respect. Ribaut and his companions took possession of the country in the name of France, and immediately began to construct a fort, which they called Fort Charles, in honor of the young king, Charles IX. Detachments scoured the country, and carried to a distance the name of France: during three years, through a course of continual suffering and intestine strife more dangerous than the hards.h.i.+ps of nature and the ambushes of savages, the French maintained themselves in their new settlement, enlarged from time to time by new emigrants. Unhappily they had frequently been recruited from amongst men of no character, importing the contagion of their vices into the little colony which Coligny had intended to found the Reformed church in the new world. In 1565 a Spanish expedition landed in Florida. Pedro Menendez de Aviles, who commanded it, had received from King Philip II. the t.i.tle of _adelantado_ (governor) of Florida; he had pledged himself, in return, to conquer for Spain this territory impudently filched from the jurisdiction which His Catholic Majesty claimed over the whole of America. The struggle lasted but a few days, in spite of the despair and courage of the French colonists; a great number were ma.s.sacred, others crowded on to the little vessels still at their disposal, and carried to France the news of the disaster.