Page:Final French Struggles in India and on the Indian Seas.djvu/104

76 nor the Empire would have foregone. But the Bourbons "treated as kings and not as traders." Consequently, though England had but one army in Southern India, and that army was exposed to destruction, Louis XVI. renounced every advantage, and allowed French India to accept, after a victorious campaign, conditions almost identical with those which had been forced upon her after the capture of her capital in 1761.

Yet the indifference of the ruler of France, noxious as it was to French interests, could not detract in the smallest degree from the merits of the illustrious man who did, for a time, restore French influence to Southern India. That man was the Bailli de Suffren. His five contests with an English fleet, of always nearly equal, once even of greater force, stamp him as being inferior to none of the great seamen whom France and England had till then produced. This has been virtually admitted by the writers on naval subjects of both nations. Mr. Clerk, whose work on naval tactics, originally published in 1778, is said to have inspired Rodney with the famous idea of breaking the line, republished, in 1790, an edition in which he cites the manœuvres of Suffren as constituting a lesson to all admirals to come, and indicates him as having been the first commander to introduce the principle of fighting at close quarters, subsequently carried to so great a perfection by Nelson. Vice-Admiral Bouët Willaumez, in his work entitled