Volume VI Part 9 (2/2)
General Wolfe had not been granted time to enjoy his victory. Mortally wounded in a bayonet charge which he himself headed, he had been carried to the rear. The surgeons who attended to him kept watching the battle from a distance. ”They fly,” exclaimed one of them. ”Who?” asked the general, raising himself painfully. ”The French!” was the answer.
”Then I am content to die.” he murmured, and expired.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Death of Wolfe----209]
Montcalm had fought like a soldier in spite of his wounds; when he fell he still gave orders about the measures to be taken and the attempts to be made. ”All is not lost,” he kept repeating. He was buried in a hole pierced by a cannonball in the middle of the church of the Ursulines; and there he still rests. In 1827, when all bad feeling had subsided, Lord Dalhousie, the then English governor of Canada, ordered the erection at Quebec of an obelisk in marble bearing the names and busts of Wolfe and Montcalm, with this inscription: _Mortem virtus communem, famam historia, monumentum posteritas dedit_ [Valor, history, and posterity a.s.signed fellows.h.i.+p in death, fame, and memorial].
In 1759, the news of the death of the two generals was accepted as a sign of the coming of the end. Quebec capitulated on the 18th of September, notwithstanding the protests of the population. The government of Canada removed to Montreal.
The joy in England was great, as was the consternation in France. The government had for a long while been aware of the state to which the army and the brave Canadian people had been reduced, the nation knew nothing about it; the repeated victories of the Marquis of Montcalm had caused illusion as to the gradual decay of resources. The English Parliament resolved to send three armies to America, and the remains of General Wolfe were interred at Westminster with great ceremony. King Louis XV.
and his ministers sent to Canada a handful of men and a vessel which suffered capture from the English; the governor's drafts were not paid at Paris. The financial condition of France did not permit her to any longer sustain the heroic devotion of her children.
M. de Lally-Tollendal was still struggling single-handed in India, exposed to the hatred and the plots of his fellow-countrymen as well as of the Hindoos, at the very moment when the Canadians, united in the same ideas of effort and sacrifice, were trying their last chance in the service of the distant mother-country, which was deserting them. The command had pa.s.sed from the hands of Montcalm into those of the general who was afterwards a marshal and Duke of Levis. He resolved, in the spring of 1760, to make an attempt to recover Quebec.
”All Europe,” says Raynal, ”supposed that the capture of the capital was an end to the great quarrel in North America. n.o.body supposed that a handful of French who lacked everything, who seemed forbidden by fortune itself to harbor any hope, would dare to dream of r.e.t.a.r.ding inevitable fate.” On the 28th of April, the army of General de Levis, with great difficulty maintained during the winter, debouched before Quebec on those Plains of Abraham but lately so fatal to Montcalm.
General Murray at once sallied from the place in order to engage before the French should have had time to pull themselves together. It was a long and obstinate struggle; the men fought hand to hand, with impa.s.sioned ardor, without the cavalry or the savages taking any part in the action; at nightfall General Murray had been obliged to re-enter the town and close the gates. The French, exhausted but triumphant, returned slowly from the pursuit; the unhappy fugitives fell into the hands of the Indians; General de Levis had great difficulty in putting a stop to the carnage. In his turn he besieged Quebec.
One single idea possessed the minds of both armies; what flag would be carried by the vessels which were expected every day in the St.
Lawrence? ”The circ.u.mstances were such on our side,” says the English writer Knox, ”that if the French fleet had been the first to enter the river, the place would have fallen again into the hands of its former masters.”
On the 9th of May, an English frigate entered the harbor. A week afterwards, it was followed by two other vessels. The English raised shouts of joy upon the ramparts, the cannon of the place saluted the arrivals. During the night between the 16th and 17th of May, the little French army raised the siege of Quebec. On the 6th of September, the united forces of Generals Murray, Amherst, and Haviland invested Montreal.
A little wall and a ditch, intended to resist the attacks of Indians, a few pieces of cannon eaten up with rust, and three thousand five hundred troops--such were the means of defending Montreal. The rural population yielded at last to the good fortune of the English, who burned on their marsh the recalcitrant villages. Despair was in every heart; M. de Vaudreuil a.s.sembled during the night a council of war. It was determined to capitulate in the name of the whole colony. The English generals granted all that was asked by the Canadian population; to its defenders they refused the honors of war. M. de Levis retired to the Island of Sainte-Helene, resolved to hold out to the last extremity; it was only at the governor's express command that he laid down arms. No more than three thousand soldiers returned to France.
The capitulation of Montreal was signed on the 8th of September, 1760; on the 10th of February, 1763, the peace concluded between France, Spain, and England completed without hope of recovery the loss of all the French possessions in America; Louisiana had taken no part in the war; it was not conquered; France ceded it to Spain in exchange for Florida, which was abandoned to the English. Canada and all the islands of the St.
Lawrence shared the same fate. Only the little islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon were preserved for the French fisheries. One single stipulation guaranteed to the Canadians the free exercise of the Catholic religion.
The princ.i.p.al inhabitants of the colony went into exile on purpose to remain French. The weak hands of King Louis XV. and of his government had let slip the fairest colonies of France,
Canada and Louisiana had ceased to belong to her; yet attachment to France subsisted there a long while, and her influence left numerous traces there. It is an honor and a source of strength to France that she acts powerfully on men through the charm and suavity of her intercourse; they who have belonged to France can never forget her.
The struggle was over. King Louis XV. had lost his American colonies, the nascent empire of India, and the settlements of Senegal. He recovered Guadaloupe and Martinique, but lately conquered by the English, Chandernuggur and the ruins of Pondicherry. The humiliation was deep and the losses were irreparable. All the fruits of the courage, of the ability, and of the pa.s.sionate devotion of the French in India and in America were falling into the hands of England. Her government had committed many faults; but the strong action of a free people had always managed to repair them. The day was coming when the haughty pa.s.sions of the mother-country and the proud independence of her colonies would engage in that supreme struggle which has given to the world the United States of America.
CHAPTER LIV.----LOUIS XV.--THE SEVEN YEARS' WAR.--MINISTRY OF THE DUKE OF CHOISEUL. 1748-1774.
It was not only in the colonies and on the seas that the peace of Aix-la- Chapelle had seemed merely a truce destined to be soon broken; hostilities had never ceased in India or Canada; English vessels scoured the world, capturing, in spite of treaties, French merchant-s.h.i.+ps; in Europe and on the continent, all the sovereigns were silently preparing for new efforts; only the government of King Louis XV., intrenched behind its disinterestedness in the negotiations, and ignoring the fatal influences of weakness and vanity, believed itself henceforth beyond the reach of a fresh war. The nation, as oblivious as the government, but less careless than it, because they had borne the burden of the fault committed, were applying for the purpose of their material recovery that power of revival which, through a course of so many errors and reverses, has always saved France; in spite of the disorder in the finances and the crus.h.i.+ng weight of the imposts, she was working and growing rich; intellectual development was following the rise in material resources; the court was corrupt and inert, like the king, but a new life, dangerously free and bold, was beginning to course through men's minds the wise, reforming instincts, the grave reflections of the dying Montesquieu no longer sufficed for them; Voltaire, who had but lately been still moderate and almost respectful, was about to commence with his friends of the _L'Encyclopedie_ that campaign against the Christian faith which was to pave the way for the materialism of our own days. ”Never was Europe more happy than during the years which rolled by between 1750 and 1758,” he has said in his _Tableau du Siecle de Louis XV._ The evil, however, was hatching beneath the embers, and the last supports of the old French society were cracking up noiselessly. The Parliaments were about to disappear, the Catholic church was becoming separated more and more widely every day from the people of whom it claimed to be the sole instructress and directress. The natural heads of the nation, the priests and the great lords, thought no longer and lived no longer as it.
The public voice was raised simultaneously against the authority or insensate prodigality of Madame de Pompadour, and against the refusal, ordered by the Archbishop of Paris, of the sacraments. ”The public, the public!” wrote M. d'Argenson; ”its animosity, its encouragements, its pasquinades, its insolence--that is what I fear above everything.” The state of the royal treasury and the measures to which recourse was had to enable the state to make both ends meet, aggravated the dissension and disseminated discontent amongst all cla.s.ses of society. Comptrollers- general came one after another, all armed with new expedients; MM. de Machault, Moreau de Sech.e.l.les, de Moras, excited, successively, the wrath and the hatred of the people crushed by imposts in peace as well as war; the clergy refused to pay the twentieth, still claiming their right of giving only a free gift; the states-districts, Languedoc and Brittany at the head, resisted, in the name of their ancient privileges, the collection of taxes to which they had not consented; riots went on multiplying; they even extended to Paris, where the government was accused of kidnapping children for transportation to the colonies. The people rose, several police-agents were ma.s.sacred; the king avoided pa.s.sing through the capital on his way from Versailles to the camp at Compiegne; the path he took in the Bois de Boulogne received the name of Revolt Road. ”I have seen in my days,” says D'Argenson, ”a decrease in the respect and love of the people for the kings.h.i.+p.”
Decadence went on swiftly, and no wonder. At forty years of age Louis XV., finding every pleasure pall, indifferent to or forgetful of business from indolence and disgust, bored by everything and on every occasion, had come to depend solely on those who could still manage to amuse him.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Madame de Pompadour----215]
Madame de Pompadour had accepted this ungrateful and sometimes shameful task. Born in the ranks of the middle cla.s.s, married young to a rich financier, M. Lenormant d'Etioles, Mdlle. Poisson, created Marchioness of Pompadour, was careful to mix up more serious matters with the royal pleasures. The precarious lot of a favorite was not sufficient for her ambition. Pretty, clever, ingenious in devising for the king new amus.e.m.e.nts and objects of interest, she played comedy before him in her small apartments and travelled with him from castle to castle; she thus obtained from his easy prodigality enormous sums to build pleasaunces which she amused herself by embellis.h.i.+ng; Bellevue, Babiole, the marchioness' house at Paris, cost millions out of the exhausted treasury.
Madame de Pompadour was fond of porcelain; she conceived the idea of imitating in France the china-work of Saxony, and founded first at Vincennes and then at Sevres the manufacture of porcelain, which the king took under his protection, requiring the courtiers to purchase the proceeds of it at high prices. Everybody was anxious to please the favorite; her incessantly renewed caprices contributed to develop certain branches of the trade in luxuries. The expenses of the royal household went on increasing daily; the magnificent prodigalities of King Louis XIV. were surpa.s.sed by the fancies of Madame de Pompadour. Vigilant in attaching the courtiers to herself, she sowed broadcast, all around her, favors, pensions, profitable offices, endowing the gentlemen to facilitate their marriage, turning a deaf ear to the complaints of the people as well as to the protests of the States or Parliaments. The greedy and frivolous crowd that thronged at her feet well deserved the severe judgment p.r.o.nounced by Montesquieu on courtiers and courts.
”Ambition amidst indolence, baseness amidst pride, the desire to grow rich without toil, aversion from truth, flattery, treason, perfidy, neglect of all engagements, contempt for the duties of a citizen, fear of virtue in the prince, hope in his weaknesses, and more than all that, the ridicule constantly thrown upon virtue, form, I trow, the characteristics of the greatest number of courtiers, distinctive in all places and at all times.” The majesty of Louis XIV. and the long l.u.s.tre of his reign had been potent enough to create illusions as to the dangers and the corruptions of the court; the remnants of military glory were about to fade out round Louis XV.; the court still swarmed with brave officers, ready to march to death at the head of the troops; the command of armies henceforth depended on the favor of Madame the Marchioness of Pompadour.
The day had come when the fortune of war was about to show itself fatal to France. Marshal Saxe had died at Chambord, still young and worn out by excesses rather than by fatigue; this foreigner, this Huguenot, as he was called by Louis XV., had been the last to maintain and continue the grand tradition of French generals. War, however, was inevitable; five months of public or private negotiation, carried on by the amba.s.sadors or personal agents of the king, could not obtain from England any reparation for her frequent violation of the law of nations; the maritime trade of France was destroyed; the vessels of the royal navy were themselves no longer safe at sea. On the 21st of December, 1755, the minister of foreign affairs, Rouille, notified to the English cabinet, ”that His Most Christian Majesty, before giving way to the effects of his resentment, once more demanded from the King of England satisfaction for all the seizures made by the English navy, as well as rest.i.tution of all vessels, whether war-s.h.i.+ps or merchant-s.h.i.+ps, taken from the French, declaring that he should regard any refusal that might be made as an authentic declaration of war.” England eluded the question of law, but refused rest.i.tution. On the 23d of January, an embargo was laid on all English vessels in French ports, and war was officially proclaimed. It had existed in fact for two years past.
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