No mark indicates the place of the action; but skeletons are taken from the ground with bullets flattened into their skulls. The French carry their victories written on their foreheads.
Later, the Comte de Gisors, son of the Maréchal de Belle-Isle[410] fell at Crefeld[411]. With him died out the name and the direct descent of Fouquet[412]. Things had passed from Mademoiselle de La Vallière to Madame de Châteauroux. There is something sad in seeing names come to their end, from century to century, from beauty to beauty, from glory to glory.
Historical antecedents.
In the month of June 1745, the second Stuart Pretender had begun his adventures: misfortunes on which I was brought up pending the time when Henry V. should replace the English Pretender in exile.
The end of those wars was the harbinger of our disasters in our colonies. La Bourdonnais[413] avenged the French flag in Asia; his dissensions with Dupleix[414], after the capture of Madras, undid all. The peace of 1748 suspended those misfortunes; hostilities broke out again in 1755; they opened with the earthquake of Lisbon[415], in which Racine's grandson perished. Under the pretext of a few plots of land at issue on the frontier of Acadia, England, without declaring war, seized upon three hundred of our merchant-ships; we lost Canada: facts immense in their consequences, above which floats the death of Wolfe and Montcalm. We were stripped of our possessions in Africa and India, and Lord Clive[416] began the conquest of Bengal. Now, during this time, the Jansenist quarrels were taking place: Damiens[417] had struck at Louis XV.; Poland had been partitioned, the expulsion of the Jesuits effected, the Court had descended to the Parc-aux-Cerfs. The author of the Family Compact[418] retired to Chanteloup, while the intellectual revolution was being completed under Voltaire. Maupeou's Plenary Court[419] was installed: Louis XV. left the scaffold to the favourite[420] who had degraded him, after sending Garat[421] and Sanson to Louis XVI., one to read, the other to execute the sentence.
This last monarch had married, on the 16th of May 1770, the daughter of Maria Theresa of Austria: we know what became of her. Next passed the ministers: Machault, old Maurepas, Turgot the economist, Malesherbes, with his ancient virtues and modern opinions, Saint-Germain[422], who destroyed the King's Household and gave a baleful order; Calonne and Necker lastly.
Louis XVI. recalled the parliaments, abolished forced labour, repealed the power of inflicting torture before the verdict had been given, restored Protestants to the enjoyment of civil rights and recognised their marriages as legal. The American War of 1779, although impolitic for France, the dupe, as always, of her generosity, was useful to the human race; it restored throughout the world the esteem in which our arms were held and the honour of our flag.
The Revolution sprang up, ready to give birth to the warlike generation which eight centuries of heroism had laid in its womb. The personal merits of Louis XVI. did not redeem the faults which his ancestors had left to him to expiate; but the blows of Providence fall on the evil, never on the man: God shortens virtue's days upon earth only to lengthen them in Heaven. Under the star of 1793, the sources of the great abyss were broken; all our glories of former days next united and made their last explosion under Bonaparte: he sends them back to us in his coffin.
When I was born.