Page:Final French Struggles in India and on the Indian Seas.djvu/31

Rh Bourdonnais combined both qualities in his own person, and the great things he had then been able to effect ought to have served as an example for the times that were to follow. But they did not. La Bourdonnais' stay in the Indian seas was short. He was succeeded by the feeble Dordelin. And subsequently, when the Government of Louis XV. made the greatest effort France had till then made to establish an empire in India; when it sent out a general who had won distinction on the battle-fields of Flanders, and soldiers who had helped to gain Fontenoy and Laffeldt, it selected as the colleague of the general an admiral of whom it has been written that "to an unproductive brain he added infirmity of purpose."

Subsequently to the capture of Pondichery in 1761, the position was reversed. When, eighteen years later, Bussy, gouty, infirm, and whom self-indulgence had made halting and undecided, was sent to command the land forces, he had as his naval colleague a man whose name, covered with an eternal ray of glory, still shines as one of the most illustrious, if not the most illustrious, in the naval annals of France. I allude to Pierre André de Suffren.

The Treaty of Paris, signed on the 10th February 1763, had restored Pondichery to France, but it was a Pondichery dismantled, beggared, bereft of all her influence. During the fifteen years which followed this humiliating treaty, Pondichery had been forced to remain a powerless spectator of the aggrandisement of