Page:History of the French in India.djvu/604

 578 THE LAST STRUGGLE FOR EMPIRE. France of Louis XV., awaited those who, though they had given all their energies to their country,* and whose faults were faults natural to humanity, had the misfortune to be unsuccessful. Revolutionary France annulled the sentence which the France of the Bourbons passed upon Lally, and restored his place in the annals of his country. Whilst there are few, who, whilst they regret a fate so untimely and so undeserved, do not recognise the justice of the reversal of the sentence pronounced upon Lally, none care to inquire after those whose combined in- capacity, corruption, and malevolence forged the bolt by which he was struck down. No memoir records the last hours of the palsied de Leyrit, or of the irresolute, mindless d'Ache. Of Bussy — Bussy who promised so well, whose performances up to a certain point were so splendid — yet who deserted Dupleix in his misfortunes, and who joined in the cabal against Lally — of Bussy it is only known that, after living luxuriously f on the enormous wealth he had acquired in India, he returned twenty years later, at the head of a fine army, to the Karnatik, there to lose his reputation and to die ! The very Company which had connived at his fate — which had shown itself on every occasion timorous, narrow-minded, and unjust — which had ruined and per- secuted to death the most illustrious of the proconsuls it had sent out to India — the Company did not long survive the execution of Lally. It died in 1769 ! after the capture, "has a higher opinion of Lally than myself. He has fought against obstacles which I believed invincible, and he has con- quered them. There is not another man in all India, who could have kept on foot for the same length of time an army without pay, and re- ceiving no assistance from any quar- ter." Another English officer wrote at the time from Madras : — "It is a con- vincing proof of his abilities, the managing so long and vigorous a de- fence in a place where he was held in universal detestation." f Not only Bussy, but de Leyrit and all the Councillors of Pondichery, took home with them large fortunes. Even that arch-intriguer, the Jesuit Lavaur, carried off with him 1,250,000 francs, besides diamonds and bills of exchange to a large amount. Yet to such an extent did he carry his duplicity, that he pretended poverty and actually petitioned to the Go- vernment for a small pension for his subsistence. — Voltaire, Orme.
 * "No one," wrote Colonel Coote