English power which had been imprudently left to grow up without
hinderance. M. de Lally had served with renown in the wars of Germany;
he had seconded Prince Charles Edward in his brave and yet frivolous
attempt upon England. The directors of the India Company went and asked
M. d'Argenson to intrust to General Lally the king's troops promised for
the expedition. "You are wrong," M. d'Argenson said to them; "I know M.
de Lally; he is a friend of mine, but he is violent, passionate,
inflexible as to discipline; he will not tolerate any disorder; you will
be setting fire to your warehouses, if you send him thither." The
directors, however, insisted, and M. de Lally set out on the 2d of May,
1757, with four ships and a body of troops. Some young officers
belonging to the greatest houses of France served on his staff.

M. de Lally's passage was a long one; the English re-enforcements had
preceded, him by six weeks. On arriving in India, he found the arsenals
and the magazines empty; the establishment of Pondicherry alone confessed
to fourteen millions of debt. Meanwhile the enemy was pressing at all
points upon the French possessions. Lally marched to Gondelour
(_Kaddaloue_), which he carried on the sixth day; he, shortly afterwards,
invested Fort St. David, the most formidable of the English fortresses in
India. The first assault was repulsed; the general had neither cannon
nor beasts of burden to draw them. He hurried off to Pondicherry and had
the natives harnessed to the artillery trains, taking pellmell such men
as fell in his way, without regard for rank or caste, imprudently
wounding the prejudices most dear to the country he had come to govern.
Fort St. David was taken and razed. Devicotah, after scarcely the ghost
of a siege, opened its gates. Lally had been hardly a month in India,
and he had already driven the English from the southern coast of the
Coromandel. "All my policy is in these five words, but they are binding
as an oath--No English in the peninsula," wrote the general. He had sent
Bussy orders to come and join him in order to attack Madras.

The brilliant courage and heroic ardor of M. de Lally had triumphed over
the first obstacles; his recklessness, his severity, his passionateness
were about to lose him the fruits of his victories. "The commission I
hold," he wrote to the directors of the Company at Paris, "imports that I
shall be held in horror by all the people of the country." By h