declare itself in favor of republican liberty, and seemed to reproach it for its slowness and timidity." Of any revenge to be taken on the enemy, not a word. "No one among us," he said further, "thought of a revolution in France, but it was rapidly taking place in our minds. Montesquieu had brought to light again the long-buried title-deeds consecrating the rights of the people. Mature men were studying and envying the laws of England."

Summing up the motives of the new crusaders, who were "starting off to the war in the name of philanthropy," he found two: "One quite reasonable and conscientious, the desire to well serve King and country ... another more unique, a veritable enthusiasm for the cause of American liberty." Ministers hesitated, on account of the greatness of the risk, "but they were, little by little, carried away by the torrent." During the sea voyage only the chiefs knew exactly whither they were going; some officers thought at one time they might have to fight elsewhere than in America. One of Rochambeau's officers, the aforementioned Mathieu-Dumas, confided his misgivings to his journal: "Above all," he wrote, "I had heartily espoused the cause of the independence of the Americans, and I should have felt extreme regret at losing the honor of combating for their liberty."[15] Of the English, again, not a word; what he longed for, like so many others, was less to fight against the English than for the Americans.

More striking, perhaps, than all the rest: shortly after we had decided to take part in the war, the question of our motives and of a possible annihilation of England as a great power was plainly put, in the course of a familiar conversation, by the president of Yale University to the future signer of the Louisiana Treaty, Barbé-Marbois, then secretary of our legation in the United States. "Mons. Marbois," Ezra Stiles confided to his diary, on the occasion of the French minister, La Luzerne, and his secretary's visit to Yale, "is a learned civilian, a councillor of the Parliament of Metz, æt. 35, as I judge; speaks English very tolerably, much better than his Excellency the minister. He was very inquisitive for books and American histories.... Among other things I asked Mons. Marbois whether the Powers of Europe would contentedly see Great Britain annihilated.

"He said, no; it would be for the interest of Europe that Britain should have weight in the balances of power.... France did not want to enlarge her dominions by conquest or otherwise."[16]

For the French diplomat, a man of great ability and well informed, addressing, as he was, one to whom a "yes" instead of a "no" would have caused no pain, far from it, the motive of our actions was neither a prospective loss by England of her rank nor the increase of our own possessions, but simply American independence.

II

Aware of the importance and difficulty of the move it had decided upon, the French Government had looked for a trained soldier, a man of decision and of sense, one who would understand Washington and be understood by him, would keep in hand the enthusiasts under his orders, and would avoid ill-prepared, risky ventures. The time of the d'Estaings was gone; definitive results were to be sought. The government considered it could do no better than to select Rochambeau. It could, indeed, do no better.

The future marshal of France had been first destined to priesthood for no other reason than that he was a second son, and he was about to receive the tonsure when his elder brother died, and Bishop de Crussol, who had been supervising Donatien's ecclesiastical studies, came one day to him and said: "You must forget all I have told you up to now; you have become the eldest of your family and you must now serve your country with as much zeal as you would have served God in the ecclesiastical state."

Rochambeau did so. He was appointed an officer and served on his first campaign in Germany at sixteen, fought under Marshal de Saxe, was a colonel at twenty-two (Washington was to become one also at twenty-two), received at Laufeldt his two first wounds, of which he nearly died. At the head of the famous Auvergne regiment, "Auvergne sans tache" (Auvergne the spotless), as it was called, he took part in the chief battles of the Seven Years' War, notably in the victory of Klostercamp, where spotless Auvergne had 58 officers and 800 soldiers killed or wounded, the battle made memorable by the episode of the Chevalier d'Assas, who went to his heroic death in the fulfilment of an order given by Rochambeau. The latter was again severely wounded, but, leaning on two soldiers, he could remain at his post till the day was won.

On the opposite side of the same battle-fields were fighting many destined, like Rochambeau himself, to take part in the American war; it was like a preliminary rehearsal of the drama that was to be. At the second battle of Minden, in 1759, where the father of Lafayette was killed, Rochambeau covered the retreat, while in the English ranks Lord Cornwallis was learning his trade, as was too, but less brilliantly, Lord George Germain, the future colonial secretary of the Yorktown period. At Johannisberg, in the same war, Clinton, future commander-in-chief at New York, was wounded, while here and there in the French army such officers distinguished themselves as Bougainville, back from Ticonderoga, and not yet a sailor, Chastellux, already a colonel, no longer a secretary of embassy, not yet an Academician, and my predecessor, La Luzerne, an officer of cavalry, not yet a diplomat, who was to be the second minister ever accredited to America, where his name is not forgotten.

When still very young Rochambeau had contracted one of those marriages so numerous in the eighteenth, as in every other century, of which nothing is said in the memoirs and letters of the period, because they were what they should be, happy ones. Every right-minded and right-hearted man will find less pleasure in the sauciest anecdote told by Lauzun than in the simple and brief lines written in his old age by Rochambeau: "My good star gave me such a wife as I could desire; she has been for me a cause of constant happiness throughout life, and I hope, on my side, to have made her happy by the tenderest amity, which has never varied an instant during nearly sixty years." The issue of that union, Viscount Rochambeau, from his youth the companion in arms of his father, an officer at fourteen, accompanied him to the States, and was, after a career of devotion to his country, to die a general at Leipzig, in the "Battle of Nations."

Informed at Versailles of the task he would have to perform, the exact nature of which was kept a secret from the troops themselves now gathered at Brest, Rochambeau hastened to forget his "rhumatisme inflammatoire" and set to work to get everything in readiness, collecting information, talking with those who knew America, and noting down in his green-garbed registers, which were to accompany him in his campaign, the chief data thus secured. He also addressed to himself, as a reminder, a number of useful recommendations such as these: "To take with us a quantity of flints, ... much flour and biscuit; have bricks as ballast for the ships, to be used for ovens; to try to bring with us all we want and not to have to ask from the Americans