“I kiss thee, etc., etc.”

One would be glad to be assured that Courtin re-established his fortune.  If he is, as I suppose, the Jacques Ignace Courtin, who was afterwards Conseiller au Conseil des Indes, we may be satisfied he did so; but French East India Company Records are a hopeless chaos at the present moment, and all that one can extract from the English Records is evidence of still further suffering.

From Murshidabad or Cossimbazar, Courtin went down to Chandernagore, whence the majority of the French inhabitants had already been sent to the Madras Coast.  The Fort had been blown up, and the private houses were under sentence of destruction, for the English had determined to destroy the town, partly in revenge for the behaviour of Lally, who, acting under instructions from the French East India Company, had shown great severity to the English in Southern India, partly because they did not think themselves strong enough to garrison Chandernagore as well as Calcutta, and feared the Moors would occupy it if they did not place troops there, and partly because they dreaded its restoration to France—­which actually happened—­when peace was made.  At any rate Courtin found the remnants of his countrymen in despair, and in 1759 he wrote a letter[168] to Clive and the Council of Calcutta, from which I quote one or two paragraphs:—­

“With the most bitter grief I have received advice of the sentence you have passed on the French Settlement at Chandernagore, by which all the buildings, as well of the Company as of private persons, are to be utterly demolished.

“Humane and compassionate as you are, Sirs, you would be sensibly affected—­were your eyes witnesses to it as mine have been—­by the distress to which this order has reduced the hearts of those unhappy inhabitants who remain in that unfortunate place, particularly if you knew that there is nothing left to the majority of them beyond these houses, on whose destruction you have resolved.  If I may believe what I hear, the motive which incites you is that of reprisal for what has happened at Cuddalore and Madras:  it does not become me to criticize either the conduct of M. Lally, our general, who, by all accounts, is a man very much to be respected by me, or your reasons, which you suppose sufficient.  Granting the latter to be so, permit me, Sirs, to address myself to your generosity and humanity, and those admirable qualities, so universally esteemed by mankind, will encourage me to take the liberty to make certain representations.

“All upbraidings are odious, and nothing is more just than the French proverb which says, to remind a person of favours done him cancels the obligation.  God forbid, Sirs, I should be guilty of this to you or your nation by reminding you for a moment, that these houses, now condemned by you, served you as an asylum in 1756, and that the owners, whom you are now reducing to the greatest