So much luck and so much glory in the Low Countries covered, in the eyes of France and of Europe, the checks encountered by the king’s armies in Italy.  The campaign of 1745 had been very brilliant.  Parma, Piacenza, Montferrat, nearly all Milaness, with the exception of a few fortresses, were in the hands of the Spanish and French forces.  The King of Sardinia had recourse to negotiation; he amused the Marquis of Argenson, at that time Louis XV.’s foreign minister, a man of honest, expansive, but chimerical views.  At the moment when the king and the marquis believed themselves to be remodelling the map of Europe at their pleasure, they heard that Charles Emmanuel had resumed the offensive.  A French corps had been surprised at Asti, on the 5th of March; thirty thousand Austrians marched down from the Tyrol, and the Spaniards evacuated Milan.  A series of checks forced Marshal Maillebois to effect a retreat; the enemy’s armies crossed the Var, and invaded French territory.  Marshal Belle-Isle fell back to Puget, four leagues from Toulon.

The Austrians had occupied Genoa, the faithful ally of France.  Their vengefulness and their severe exactions caused them to lose the fruits of their victory.  The grandees were ruined by war-requisitions; the populace were beside themselves at the insolence of the conquerors; senators and artisans made common cause.  An Austrian captain having struck a workman, the passengers in the streets threw themselves upon him and upon his comrades who came to his assistance; the insurrection spread rapidly in all quarters of Genoa; there was a pillage of the weapons lying heaped in the palace of the Doges; the senators put themselves at the head of the movement; the peasants in the country flew to arms.  The Marquis of Botta, the Austrian commandant, being attacked on all sides, and too weak to resist, sallied from the town with nine regiments.  The allies, disquieted and dismayed, threatened Provence, and laid siege to Genoa.  Louis XV. felt the necessity of not abandoning his ally; the Duke of Boufflers and six thousand French shut themselves up in the place.  “Show me the danger,” the general had said on entering the town; “it is my duty to ascertain it; I shall make all my glory depend upon securing you from it.”  The resistance of Genoa was effectual; but it cost the life of the Duke of Boufflers, who was wounded in an engagement, and died three days before the retreat of the Austrians, on the 6th of July, 1747.

On the 19th of July, Common-Sense Belle-Isle (Bon-Sens de Belle-Isle), as the Chevalier was called at court, to distinguish him from his brother the marshal, nicknamed Imagination, attacked, with a considerable body of troops, the Piedmontese intrenchments at the Assietta Pass, between the fortresses of Exilles and Fenestrelles; at the same time, Marshal Belle-Isle was seeking a passage over the Stura Pass, and the Spanish army was attacking Piedmont by the way of