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Updated: June 19, 2025
While moving along the road this morning, we found a man, who had deserted from us a short time before, in the uniform of a French dragoon, with his head laid open by one of our bullets. He was still alive, exciting any thing but sympathy among his former associates. Towards the afternoon we found the enemy in force, on the plain in front of Pombal, where we exchanged some shots. March 11th.
The two officers now rode at the head of the detachment, and two only of the Portuguese soldiers kept in rear of the mules, which now followed at a distance of thirty or forty yards behind them. They stopped that night at Rolica and the next at Leirya. This was a long march, and a short one the next day brought them to Pombal, and the following afternoon they arrived at Coimbra.
We went on to Leiria, where a great market gave us an opportunity of admiring the beauty of the country women and their charming costumes. We put up in a posada, in which the stable was on the first floor and the kitchen on the second, and where we shared rooms with geese and pigs and a party of travelling gelders from France. After Leiria came Pombal.
Ask the aged and respectable inhabitants of Pernambuco, and they will tell thee that the destruction of the Society of Jesus was a terrible disaster to the public, and its consequences severely felt to the present day. When Pombal took the reins of power into his own hands, virtue and learning beamed bright within the college walls.
On our route we came up with the French at Thomar, but on our appearance they retreated to Espinal, a short distance off Pombal, and took up a strong position between these two latter places. We followed them up and combined ourselves again into one body.
To the long-lasting sorrow and disgrace of Portugal, the philosophers blinded her king and flattered her prime minister. Pombal was exactly the tool these sappers of every public and private virtue wanted. He had the naked sword of power in his own hand, and his heart was hard as flint. He struck a mortal blow and the Society of Jesus, throughout the Portuguese dominions, was no more.
Ney's division covered the rear, and several sharp fights took place which are known in history as the combats of Pombal, Redinha, Cazal Nova, Foz d'Aronce, and Sabugal.
If any one requires to be convinced that speculative thought is one of the chief elements of social power, let him bethink himself of the age in which there was scarcely a throne in Europe which was not filled by a liberal and reforming king, a liberal and reforming emperor, or, strangest of all, a liberal and reforming pope; the age of Frederic the Great, of Catherine the Second, of Joseph the Second, of Peter Leopold, of Benedict XIV., of Ganganelli, of Pombal, of D'Aranda; when the very Bourbons of Naples were liberals and reformers, and all the active minds among the noblesse of France were filled with the ideas which were soon after to cost them so dear.
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