Introduction 
xix 
grande qualite were assembled together. At the third of 
these meetings, held in May 1664, a protocol of forty 
articles was agreed to, constituting the Company; and 
it was suggested that certain delegates should submit 
this charter to his Majesty, who had in reality, during 
all these preliminary arrangements, been actually pulling 
the wires himself. His Majesty, it may be remembered, 
was at this time just twenty-five and a half years of age, 
and entered into the whole business with the greatest zest. 
The various methods made use of to promote the raising 
of finances for the Company by syndics are carefully 
traced by M. Pauliat in his interesting book, which tells 
us of the manifold intrigues by which the unwary traders 
were regularly entrapped by the designing monarch. The 
final scene, when the election of the directors was carried 
on under the King’s personal presidency in an ante¬ 
chamber of the Louvre, and when his Majesty, the chair¬ 
man, coolly walked off with the voting urns to make his 
own scrutiny in his private rooms, conveys an admirable 
example of the wily manoeuvres by which the King ob¬ 
tained the personal direction and dictatorship of the 
French East India Company. 
No sooner had he thus gained possession of the funds 
subscribed than he set to work to realise his scheme for 
the colonisation of Madagascar; on which he had previously 
determined, in order to secure a base for the naval opera¬ 
tions by which he proposed to obtain for France her 
predominance in the Indian Ocean, and to establish a 
Gallia Orientalis in the East Indies. 
Fort Dauphin was assigned as the seat of government, 
and thither were despatched MM. de Beausse and Montau- 
bon, with directions to take possession of the establishments 
of the defunct Societe de VOrient. This mission left Brest 
for Madagascar in i665,and arrived only to find the whole 
country of Anosy—the province surrounding Fort Dauphin 
