ary to remove two men from posts for which they were eminently
fit. Immoral and hardhearted as Rosen and Avaux were, Rosen was a
skilful captain, and Avaux was a skilful politician. Though it is not
probable that they would have been able to avert the doom of Ireland, it
is probable that they might have been able to protract the contest; and
it was evidently for the interest of France that the contest should be
protracted. But it would have been an affront to the old general to put
him under the orders of Lauzun; and between the ambassador and Lauzun
there was such an enmity that they could not be expected to act
cordially together. Both Rosen and Avaux, therefore, were, with many
soothing assurances of royal approbation and favour, recalled to
France. They sailed from Cork early in the spring by the fleet which had
conveyed Lauzun thither, [627] Lauzun had no sooner landed than he found
that, though he had been long expected, nothing had been prepared for
his reception. No lodgings had been provided for his men, no place of
security for his stores, no horses, no carriages, [628] His troops had
to undergo the hardships of a long march through a desert before
they arrived at Dublin. At Dublin, indeed, they found tolerable
accommodation. They were billeted on Protestants, lived at free
quarter, had plenty of bread, and threepence a day. Lauzun was appointed
Commander in Chief of the Irish army, and took up his residence in the
Castle, [629] His salary was the same with that of the Lord Lieutenant,
eight thousand Jacobuses, equivalent to ten thousand pounds sterling, a
year. This sum James offered to pay, not in the brass which bore his own
effigy, but in French gold. But Lauzun, among whose faults avarice had
no place, refused to fill his own coffers from an almost empty treasury,
[630]

On him and on the Frenchmen who accompanied him the misery of the Irish
people and the imbecility of the Irish government produced an effect
which they found it difficult to describe. Lauzun wrote to Louvois that
the Court and the whole kingdom were in a state not to be imagined by a
person who had always lived in well governed countries. It was, he
said, a chaos, such as he had read of in the book of Genesis. The whole
business of all the public functionaries was to quarrel with each other,
and to plunder the government and the people. After he had been about
a month at the Castle, he declared that he would not go through such
another mo