es,
and even her successes, beyond her own frontiers should become fatal to
her." The defaults of the government and the jealous passions of the
colonists themselves, in the eighteenth century, seriously aggravated the
military reverses which were to cost the French nearly all their
colonies.

More than a hundred years previously, at the outset of Louis XIV.'s
personal reign, and through the persevering efforts of Colbert marching
in the footsteps of Cardinal Richelieu, an India Company had been founded
for the purpose of developing French commerce in those distant regions,
which had always been shrouded in a mysterious halo of fancied wealth and
grandeur. Several times the Company had all but perished; it had revived
under the vigorous impulse communicated by Law, and had not succumbed at
the collapse of his system. It gave no money to its shareholders, who
derived their benefits only from a partial concession of the tobacco.
revenues, granted by the king to the Company, but its directors lived a
life of magnificence in the East, where they were authorized to trade on
their own account. Abler and bolder than all his colleagues, Joseph
Dupleix, member of a Gascon family and son of the comptroller-general of
Hainault, had dreamed of other destinies than the management of a
counting-house; he aspired to endow France with the empire of India.
Placed at a very early age at the head of the French establishments at
Chandernuggur, he had improved the city and constructed a fleet, all the
while acquiring for himself an immense fortune; he had just been sent to
Pondicherry as governor-general of the Company's agencies, when the war
of succession to the empire broke out in 1742. For a long time past
Dupleix and his wife, who was called in India Princess Jane, had been
silently forming a vast network of communications and correspondence
which kept them acquainted with the innumerable intrigues of all the
petty native courts. Madame Dupleix, a Creole, brought up in India,
understood all its dialects. Her husband had been the first to conceive
the idea of that policy which was destined before long to deliver India
to the English, his imitators; mingling everywhere in the incessant
revolutions which were hatching all about him, he gave the support of
France at one time to one pretender and at another to another, relying
upon the discipline of the European troops and upon the force of his own
genius for securing the ascendency