But the Poles were not sufficiently enlightened fully to comprehend the virtue and the sacredness of the ballot-box.  The Russian army was now hastening to the gates of Warsaw.  The small minority of Polish nobles opposed to the election of Stanislaus seceded from the diet, mounted their horses, crossed the Vistula, and joined the invading array to make war upon the sovereign whom the majority had chosen.  The retribution for such folly and wickedness has come.  There is no longer any Poland.  They who despise the authority of the ballot-box inevitably usher in the bayonets of despotism.  Under the protection of this army the minority held another diet at Kamien (on the 5th of October), a village just outside the suburbs of Warsaw, and chose as the sovereign of Poland Augustus, son of the deceased king.  The minority, aided by the Russian and imperial armies, were too strong for the majority.  They took possession of Warsaw, and crowned their candidate king, with the title of Augustus III.  Stanislaus, pressed by an overpowering force, retreated to Dantzic, at the mouth of the Vistula, about two hundred miles from Warsaw.  Here he was surrounded by the Russian troops and held in close siege, while Augustus III. took possession of Poland.  France could do nothing.  A weary march of more than a thousand miles separated Paris from Warsaw, and the French troops would be compelled to fight their way through the very heart of the German empire, and at the end of the journey to meet the united armies of Russia, Prussia, Austria and Poland under her king, now in possession of all the fortresses.

Though Louis XV. could make no effectual resistance, it was not in human nature but that he should seek revenge.  When shepherds quarrel, they kill each other’s flocks.  When kings quarrel, they kill the poor peasants in each other’s territories, and burn their homes.  France succeeded in enlisting in her behalf Spain and Sardinia.  Austria and Russia were upon the other side.  Prussia, jealous of the emperor’s greatness, declined any active participation.  Most of the other powers of Europe also remained neutral.  France had now no hope of placing Stanislaus upon the throne; she only sought revenge, determined to humble the house of Austria.  The mercenary King of Sardinia, Charles Emanuel, was willing to serve the one who would pay the most.  He first offered himself to the emperor, but upon terms too exorbitant to be accepted.  France and Spain immediately offered him terms even more advantageous than those he had demanded of the emperor.  The contract was settled, and the Sardinian army marched into the allied camp.

The King of Sardinia, who was as ready to employ guile as force in warfare, so thoroughly deceived the emperor as to lead him to believe that he had accepted the emperor’s terms, and that Sardinia was to be allied with Austria, even when the whole contract was settled with France and Spain, and the plan of the campaign was matured.  So utterly was the emperor deluded by a fraud so contemptible, in the view of every honorable mind, that he sent great convoys of grain, and a large supply of shot, shells and artillery from the arsenals of Milan into the Sardinian camp.  Charles Emanuel, dead to all sense of magnanimity, rubbed his hands with delight in the successful perpetration of such fraud, exclaiming, “An virtus an dolos, quis ab hoste requirat.”