English marched against this town.  Lally shut himself up there in the month of March, 1760.  Bussy had been made prisoner, and Coote had sent him to Europe.  “At the head of the French army Bussy would be in a position by himself alone to prolong the war for ten years,” said the Hindoos.  On the 27th of November, the siege of Pondicherry was transformed into an investment.  Lally had taken all the precautions of a good general, but he had taken them with his usual harshness; he had driven from the city all the useless mouths; fourteen hundred Hindoos, old men, women, and children, wandered for a week between the English camp and the ramparts of the town, dying of hunger and misery, without Lally’s consenting to receive them back into the place; the English at last allowed them to pass.  The most severe requisitions had been ordered to be made on all the houses of Pondicherry, and the irritation was extreme; the heroic despair of M. de Lally was continually wringing from him imprudent expressions.  “I would rather go and command a set of Caffres than remain in this Sodom, which the English fire, in default of Heaven’s, must sooner or later destroy,” had for a long time past been a common expression of the general’s, whose fate was henceforth bound up with that of Pondicherry.

He held out for six weeks, in spite of famine, want of money, and ever-increasing dissensions.  A tempest had caused great havoc to the English squadron which was out at sea; Lally was waiting and waiting for the arrival of M. d’Ache with the fleet which had but lately sought refuge at Ile de France after a fresh reverse.  From Paris, on the report of an attack projected by the—­English against Bourbon and Ile de France, ministers had given orders to M. d’Ache not to quit those waters.  Lally and Pondicherry waited in vain.

It became necessary to surrender; the council of the Company called upon the general to capitulate; Lally claimed the honors of war, but Coote would have the town at discretion; the distress was extreme as well as the irritation.  Pondicherry was delivered up to the conquerors on the 16th of January, 1761; the fortifications and magazines were razed; French power in India, long supported by the courage or ability of a few men, was foundering, never to rise again.  “Nobody can have a higher opinion than I of M. de Lally,” wrote Colonel Coote; “he struggled against obstacles that I considered insurmountable, and triumphed over them.  There is not in India another man who could have so long kept an army standing without pay and without resources in any direction.”  “A convincing proof of his merits,” said another English officer, “is his long and vigorous resistance in a place in which he was universally detested.”

[Illustration:  Lally at Pondicherry——­184]