Never in Europe had power been more centralized, and never in France had the reins been held by persons so pitiful, impelled by motives so contemptible.  The levity, vanity, and spite of a concubine became a mighty engine to influence the destinies of nations.  Louis XV., enervated by pleasures and devoured by ennui, still had his emotions; he shared Pompadour’s detestation of Frederic, and he was tormented at times by a lively fear of damnation.  But how damn a king who had entered the lists as champion of the Church?  England was Protestant, and so was Prussia; Austria was supremely Catholic.  Was it not a merit in the eyes of God to join her in holy war against the powers of heresy?  The King of the Parc-aux-Cerfs would propitiate Heaven by a new crusade.

Henceforth France was to turn her strength against her European foes; and the American war, the occasion of the universal outbreak, was to hold in her eyes a second place.  The reasons were several:  the vanity of Pompadour, infatuated by the advances of the Empress-Queen, and eager to secure her good graces; the superstition of the King; the anger of both against Frederic; the desire of D’Argenson, minister of war, that the army, and not the navy, should play the foremost part; and the passion of courtiers and nobles, ignorant of the naval service, to win laurels in a continental war,—­all conspired to one end.  It was the interest of France to turn her strength against her only dangerous rival; to continue as she had begun, in building up a naval power that could face England on the seas and sustain her own rising colonies in America, India, and the West Indies:  for she too might have multiplied herself, planted her language and her race over all the globe, and grown with the growth of her children, had she not been at the mercy of an effeminate profligate, a mistress turned procuress, and the favorites to whom they delegated power.

Still, something must be done for the American war; at least there must be a new general to replace Dieskau.  None of the Court favorites wanted a command in the backwoods, and the minister of war was free to choose whom he would.  His choice fell on Louis Joseph, Marquis de Montcalm-Gozon de Saint-Veran.

Montcalm was born in the south of France, at the Chateau of Candiac, near Nimes, on the twenty-ninth of February, 1712.  At the age of six he was placed in the charge of one Dumas, a natural son of his grandfather.  This man, a conscientious pedant, with many theories of education, ruled his pupil stiffly; and, before the age of fifteen, gave him a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, and history.  Young Montcalm had a taste for books, continued his reading in such intervals of leisure as camps and garrisons afforded, and cherished to the end of his life the ambition of becoming a member of the Academy.  Yet, with all his liking for study, he sometimes revolted against the sway of the pedagogue who wrote letters of complaint to