ridiculous, I am treated as the vilest of mankind. I am in the most deplorable indigence. The little property that remained to me has been seized. I am compelled to ask for decrees for delay in order not to be dragged to prison.'
Thus wrote, three days before he died, the man who had dug for France the foundations of an Empire which would, if built upon, have made her the arbiter of the East. Nations have their moods of infatuation. In 1754-6 France had hers. Acting in concert with the rival who was to supplant her, she recalled her far-seeing architect, left the foundations desolate and unguarded, and only realised her mistake when she witnessed her rival eagerly adopting those very plans, and building upon those very foundations which the genius of her own architect had devised and marked out. Meanwhile, she had allowed that architect to die 'in misery and want.'
Dupleix died November 10, 1764. Notwithstanding the neglect of his contemporaries, he will ever be regarded as one of the greatest of Frenchmen. Even the rivals who profited by his recall place him on a pedestal scarcely, if at all, lower than the pedestals upon which stand Clive, Warren Hastings, and Wellesley. In grandness of conception, and in the wide scope of his projects of empire, he was their forerunner — unconsciously on their part perhaps, their inspirer.
