CHAPTER LIII.----LOUIS XV., FRANCE IN THE COLONIES. 1745-1763.

France was already beginning to perceive her sudden abasement in Europe;
the defaults of her generals as well as of her government sometimes
struck the king himself; he threw the blame of it on the barrenness of
his times. "This age is not fruitful in great men," he wrote to Marshal
Noailles: "you know that we miss subjects for all objects, and you have
one before your eyes in the case of the army which certainly impresses me
more than any other." Thus spoke Louis XV. on the eve of the battle of
Fontenoy Marshal Saxe was about to confer upon the French arms a
transitory lustre; but the king, who loaded him with riches and honors,
never forgot that he was not his born subject. "I allow that Count Saxe
is the best officer to command that we have," he would say; "but he is a
Huguenot, he wants to be supreme, and he is always saying that, if he is
thwarted, he will enter some other service. Is that zeal for France?
I see, however, very few of ours who aim high like him."

The king possessed at a distance, in the colonies of the Two Indies, as
the expression then was, faithful servants of France, passionately
zealous for her glory, "aiming high," ambitious or disinterested, able
politicians or heroic pioneers, all ready to sacrifice both property and
life for the honor and power of their country: it is time to show how La
Bourdonnais, Dupleix, Bussy, Lally-Tollendal were treated in India; what
assistance, what guidance, what encouragement the Canadians and their
illustrious chiefs received from France, beginning with Champlain, one
of the founders of the colony, and ending with Montcalm, its latest
defender. It is a painful but a salutary spectacle to see to what
meannesses a sovereign and a government may find themselves reduced
through a weak complaisance towards the foreigner, in the feverish desire
of putting an end to a war frivolously undertaken and feebly conducted.

French power in India threw out more lustre, but was destined to
speedier, and perhaps more melancholy, extinction than in Canada.
Single-handed in the East the chiefs maintained the struggle against the
incapacity of the French government and the dexterous tenacity of the
enemy; in America the population of French extraction upheld to the
bitter end the name, the honor, and the flag of their country. "The fate
of France," says Voltaire, "has nearly always been that her enterpris