All Englishmen are supposed in France to suffer from a mysterious disease known as "le spleen." I have not the faintest idea of what this means. The spleen is, I believe, an internal organ whose functions are very imperfectly understood, still it is an accepted article of faith in France that every Briton is "devore de spleen," and that this lamentable state of things embitters his whole outlook on life, and casts a black shadow over his existence. When I got to know M. Bayol better during our evening tramps up and down the deck, he asked me confidentially what remedies I adopted when "ronge de spleen," and how I combated the attacks of this deplorable but peculiarly insular disease, and was clearly incredulous when I failed to understand him. This amazing man also told me that he had been married five times. Not one of his first four wives had been able to withstand the unhealthy climate of Pondicherry for more than eighteen months, so, after the demise of his fourth French wife, he had married a native, "ne pouvant vivre seul, j'ai tout bonnement epouse une indigene."
M. Bayol insisted on showing me the glories of Pondicherry himself, an offer which I, anxious to see a Franco-Indian town, readily accepted. There is no harbour there, and owing to the heavy surf, the landing must be made in a surf-boat, a curious keel-less craft built of thin pliant planks sewn together with copper wire, which bobs about on the surface of the water like a cork. At Pondicherry, as in all French Colonial possessions, an attempt has been made to reproduce a little piece of France. There was the dusty "Grande Place," surrounded with even dustier trees and numerous cafes; the "Cafe du Progres"; the "Cafe de l'Union," and other stereotyped names familiar from a hundred French towns, and pale-faced civilians, with a few officers in uniform, were seated at the usual little tables in front of them. Everything was as different as possible from an average Anglo-Indian cantonment: even the natives spoke French, or what was intended to be French, amongst themselves. The whole place had a rather dejected, out-at-elbows appearance, but it atoned for its diminishing trade by its amazing number of officials. That little town seemed to contain more bureaucrats than Calcutta, and almost eclipsed our own post-war gigantic official establishments. On arriving at my French friend's house, the fifth Madame Bayol, a lady of dark chocolate complexion, and numerous little pale coffee-coloured Bayols greeted their spouse and father with rapturous shouts of delight. Later in the day, M. Bayol, drawing me on one side, said, "We have become friends on the voyage; I will now show you the room which enshrines my most sacred memories," and drawing a key from his pocket, he unlocked a door, admitting me to a very large room perfectly bare and empty except for four stripped bedsteads standing in the centre. "These, mon ami, are the beds on which my four French wives breathed their last, and this room is very dear to me in consequence," and the fat little Marseillais burst into tears. I have no wish to be unfeeling, but I really felt as though I had stumbled undesignedly upon some of the more intimate details connected with Bluebeard's matrimonial difficulties, and when M. Bayol began, the tears streaming down his cheeks, to give me a brief account of his first wife's last moments, the influence of this Bluebeard chamber began asserting itself, and it was all I could do to refrain from singing (of course very sympathetically) the lines from Offenbach's Barbe-Bleue beginning:
"Ma premiere femme est morte
Que le diable l'emporte!"
but on second thoughts I refrained.
M. Bayol's garden reminded me of that of the immortal Tartarin of Tarascon, for the only green things in it grew in pots, and nothing was over four inches high. The rest of the garden consisted of bare, sun-baked tracts of clay, intersected by gravel walks. I felt certain that amongst these seedlings there must have been a two-inch high specimen of the Baobab "l'arbre geant," the pride of Tartarin's heart, the tree which, as he explained, might under favourable conditions grow 200 feet high. After all, Marseilles and Tarascon are not far apart, and their inhabitants are very similar in temperament.
I was pleased to see a fine statue of Dupleix at Pondicherry, for he was a man to whom scant justice has been done by his compatriots. Few people seem to realise how very nearly Dupleix succeeded in his design of building up a great French empire in India. He arrived in India in 1715, at the age of eighteen, and amassed a large fortune in legitimate trade; he became Administrator of Chandernagore, in Bengal, in 1730, and displayed such remarkable ability in this post that in 1741 he was appointed Governor-General of the French Indies. In 1742 war broke out between France and Britain, and at the outset the French arms were triumphant. Madras surrendered in 1746 to a powerful French fleet under La Bourdonnais, the Governor of the Island of Reunion, and a counterattack on Pondicherry by Admiral Boscawen's fleet in 1748 failed utterly, though the defence was conducted by Dupleix, a civilian. These easy French successes inspired Dupleix with the idea of establishing a vast French empire in India on the ruins of the Mogul monarchy, but here he was frustrated by the military genius of Clive, who, it must be remembered, started life as a civilian "writer" in the East India Company's service. Dupleix encountered his first check by Clive's dashing capture of Arcot in 1751. From that time the fortunes of war inclined with ever-increasing bias to the British side, and the decisive battle of Plassey in 1757 (three years after Dupleix's return to France) was a death-blow to the French aspirations to become the preponderant power in India.
Dupleix was shabbily treated by France. He received but little support from the mother country; the vast sums he had expended from his private resources in prosecuting the war were never refunded to him; he was consistently maligned by the jealous and treacherous La Bourdonnais, and after his recall to France in 1754 his services to his country were never recognised, and he died in poverty.
G. B. Malleson's Dupleix is a most impartial and interesting account of this remarkable man's life: it has been translated into French and is accepted by the French as an accurate text-book.
The whole reign of Louis XV. was a supremely disastrous period for French Colonial aspirations. Not only did the dream of a great French empire in the East crumble away just as it seemed on the very point of realisation, but after Wolfe's victory on the Heights of Abraham at Quebec, Canada was formally ceded by France to Britain in 1763, by the Treaty of Paris.
This ill fortune pursued France into the succeeding reign of Louis XVI., for in April, 1782, Rodney's great victory over Count de Grasse off Dominica transferred the Lesser Antilles from French to British suzerainty.