Page:History of the French in India.djvu/192

 170 LA BOURDONNAIS AND DUPLEIX. chap, bend his haughty spirit to sue for the amity which, ^_ ', when pressed upon him " as a brother, as a friend," he 1746. had rejected, was a course which La Bourdonnais, of all men, would have scorned. Something, nevertheless, must be done. Dupleix could afford to wait for the future. It was from La Bourdonnais that the overtures must come. He made them. Not, indeed, in that open, straight- forward way, which would have acknowledged his error, and which would have caused the immediate renewal of cordial relations with Dupleix, but in that tortuous, in- direct manner which those adopt, who, having com- mitted an error, and finding that the consequences of that error are recoiling on themselves, are yet too much the slaves of a false pride to make a candid confession. This was the plan he adopted. He commissioned Paradis, the Commandant of the Pondichery contingent, and whom, it will be remembered, he had placed in arrest, to sound Dupleix as to whether he would agree to the treaty of ransom, provided the restoration of Madras were deferred from October to January or February, with a view, ostensibly, to make a proper division of the spoils. If he could agree to that, Paradis added, La Bourdonnais would leave behind 150 of his own troops to reinforce those of Pondichery. This proposition came upon Dupleix just immediately after his authority had been insulted and defied, when he, the civil power, had had flaunted before him, by the chief military power, the irresistible argument of brute force. He had divined some, if not all, of the motives of La Bourdonnais, and he had made up his mind to keep no terms with him. Openly to break off all cor- respondence with one who wielded the physical force of the colony would be however, in his opinion, conductive neither to French interests in general, nor to the in- terests of Pondichery in particular. But on receiving this indirect overture from Paradis, he saw in it a means