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Updated: June 19, 2025
I thought the matter arranged, when the Marquis laid his hand on the young fellow's arm and checked him. 'This must not be, he said, turning from him to me with his grand, fine-gentleman's air. 'You know me, M. de Berault. This matter has gone far enough. 'Too far! M. de Pombal, I answered bitterly. 'Still, if you wish to take your friend's place, I shall raise no objection.
The moon had risen above the beacon, and there, clear outlined against its silver light, was the figure of the man stretched upon the top. The brigands were either in their camp or standing round the beacon, for none of them stopped or questioned our little party. De Pombal led them in the direction of the precipice.
Even from where we stood we could see that impassive body amid the flames, and the black figures of the guerillas as they danced, howling like cannibals, round the pile. Ha! how I shook my fist at them, the dogs, and how I vowed that one day my Hussars and I would make the reckoning level! De Pombal knew how the outposts were placed and all the paths which led through the forest.
Why did he not give it up; retire into obscurity again, since the Law would not acknowledge him? cry several. That is where they mistake. For him there was no giving of it up! Prime ministers have governed countries, Pitt, Pombal, Choiseul; and their word was a law while it held: but this Prime Minister was one that could not get resigned.
The attack on Pombal is in Francis's concluding observations. Some of the notes are very interesting, as illustrating the feeling of national superiority among the English, and of national depression among the French, between 1763 and the American War of Independence see pp. 52, 66, 166.
Built perhaps to commemorate the expulsion of the Jews, it shared the fate of the Jesuits who instigated the expulsion, and was destroyed only a few years before they were driven from the country by the Marques de Pombal.
It was soon found that they were concentrating at Pombal, with the apparent intention of crossing the Mondego at Coimbra; whereby they would have obtained a fresh and formidable position behind the Mondego, with the rich and untouched country between that river and the Douro, upon which they could have subsisted for a long time.
If we inquire why the many attempts to reform the Ancien Regime, which the eighteenth century witnessed, were failures one and all; why Pombal failed in Portugal, Aranda in Spain, Joseph II. in Austria, Ferdinand and Caroline in Naples for these last, be it always remembered, began as humane and enlightened sovereigns, patronising liberal opinions, and labouring to ameliorate the condition of the poor, till they were driven by the murder of Marie Antoinette into a paroxysm of rage and terror why, above all, Louis XVI., who attempted deeper and wiser reforms than any other sovereign, failed more disastrously than any is not the answer this, that all these reforms would but have cleansed the outside of the cup and the platter, while they left the inside full of extortion and excess?
This is not the place to tell of the administration of the Marques de Pombal, who rose to eminence owing to the great ability he showed after this awful calamity, or to give a history of how he expelled the Jesuits, subdued the nobles, attempted to make Portugal a manufacturing country, abolished slavery and the differences between the Old and the New Christians, reformed the administration and the teaching of the University of Coimbra, and robbed the Inquisition of half its terrors by making its trials public.
I was accompanied by Captain Nunes, whose great-grandfather, also a captain in the time of the Marquis of Pombal, received sealed orders, to be opened only on a certain day. When that day arrived, he found the command to go with his company, seize all the Jesuits of this establishment, and march them as prisoners to the coast.
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