Page:History of the French in India.djvu/23

 HISTORY OF THE FRENCH IN INDIA. CHAPTER I. THE EARLY FRENCH IN INDIA. Of the five great European maritime powers of the six- chap. teenth and seventeenth centuries, France was the fourth to enter into the race for commercial communication with India. The fifth power, Spain, never attempted the con- test, and Fortugal, Holland, and England had reaped considerable benefits from their enterprise before the attention of the French people had been sufficiently attracted to the trade. Nevertheless, though the French were the last to enter upon the venture, though entering upon it after the three powers we have named had ob- tained a firm and solid footing on the soil, their natural genius asserted itself in a manner that speedily brought them on a level with the most securely planted of their European rivals. The restless action that had made the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the fomenter of disturbances in Europe soon found in India a wide field for its display, whilst the ambition that had urged her most famous monarch to dream of universal dominion in the West, began, before very long, to form plans for the attainment of a French empire in the East. He was a French statesman who first dared to aspire to B