Ruin of a Nabob
Fountain of the Elephants. By Desmond Young. (Collins, 18s.)
'LED by a blind and teachit by a bairn,' the Savoyard general who forged for the Mahrattas a foot army which could have subjugated all native India came proudly back to Europe and fell like a booby for one of the nastiest, worst- spoiled little girls of whom memoirs have kept record. Morally, she killed him—and she ate him; transformed a stern and beloved soldier within weeks into a wretch alternating puerile scenes with maddened pleas for forgiveness, and then lived on his money for thirty-six years after he was dead. General Benoit de Boigne spent most of his married life by himself, immured in his own humiliation at his house near Chambery. If he had not met Adele d'Osmond, what might this man have done?
Mr. Young's marvellously researched bio- graphy, which adds startling facts about de Boigne to what is known already, suggests that by the time that he retired to Europe, he had almost exhausted the possibilities open to him in India. In 1790 he had become general to Mahadaji Sindhia, the Mahratta chieftain, and in a few years his infantry trained in the European manner had given Sindhia a practical dominance over all Northern India. De Boigne's military capacity had been fairly well extended : he had certainly shown courage, determination, and a rare 'talent for logistics and administration. But to face the British battalions of the East India Company would have been another matter, and that would have been the consequence of indefinite Mahratta expansion. In fact it was the consequence a few years after his departure, and Arthur Wellesley proved the military point at Assaye, although the disciplined Mahratta infantry gave him the 'most severe battle I have ever fought in India.' Anyway, de Boigne was a Savoyard, not a Frenchman, and he was well disposed towards the British. The prize discovery of Mr. Young's excavations at Chambdry was an unsuspected grant to him of British nationality.
But de Boigne does seem to have been a man who missed buses. He first joined the Franco- Irish Regiment of Clare, but it was disbanded before he could achieve high rank. Then he went to the Russian service under Alexis Orlov, but was at once captured by the Turks. He travelled to India, where Warren Hastings seems to have entrusted him with a vital secret survey of the routes to Russia, but as he travelled northwards, Sindhia stole all his papers, and eventually his allegiance too. The signs in his life pointed him towards Russia, but twice he was discouraged from following them. Instead of competing for a European marshalcy, he was content to be what Buchan called 'a pope among the half-baked.' And when he returned to Europe he stumbled into the arms of an eighteen-year-old cannibal.
NEAL ASCI1ERSON
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