His straightforward narrative helps us now and then to correct a mis-statement made by the besieged in the bitterness of defeat.  On the English side, besides the Bengal records, there are Clive’s and Eyre Coote’s military journals, the Logs of the British ships of war, and the journal of Surgeon Edward Ives of His Majesty’s ship Kent.  Thus this passage of arms, almost the only one in Bengal[18] in which the protagonists were Europeans, is no obscure event, but one in which almost every incident was seen and described from opposite points of view.  This multiplicity of authorities makes it difficult to form a connected narrative, and, in respect to many incidents, I shall have to follow that account which seems to enter into the fullest or most interesting detail.

It will now be necessary to go back a little.  After the capture of Calcutta in June, 1756, the behaviour of the Nawab to all Europeans was so overbearing that Renault found it necessary to ask the Superior Council of Pondicherry for reinforcements, but all that he received was 67 Europeans and 167 Sepoys.  No money was sent him, and every day he expected to hear that war had broken out between France and England.

“Full of these inquietudes, gentlemen, I was in the most cruel embarrassment, knowing not even what to desire.  A strong detestation of the tyranny of the Nawab, and of the excesses which he was committing against Europeans, made me long for the arrival of the English in the Ganges to take vengeance for them.  At the same time I feared the consequences of war being declared.  In every letter M. de Leyrit[19] impressed upon me the necessity of fortifying Chandernagore as best I could, and of putting the town in a state of security against a surprise, but you have only to look at Chandernagore to see how difficult it was for us, absolutely destitute as we were of men and money, to do this with a town open on all sides, and with nothing even to mark it off from the surrounding country."[20]

He goes on to describe Fort d’Orleans—­

“almost in the middle of the settlement, surrounded by houses, which command it, a square of about 600 feet,[21] built of brick, flanked with four bastions, with six guns each, without ramparts or glacis.  The southern curtain, about 4 feet thick, not raised to its full height, was provided only with a battery of 3 guns; there was a similar battery to the west, but the rest of the west curtain was only a wall of mud and brick, about a foot and a half thick, and 8 or 10 feet high; there were warehouses ranged against the east curtain which faced the Ganges, and which was still in process of construction; the whole of this side had no ditch, and that round the other sides was dry, only 4 feet in depth, and a mere ravine.  The walls of the Fort up to the ramparts were 15 feet high, and the houses, on the edge of the counterscarp, which commanded it, were as much as 30 feet.”