general rule of policy,"
Frederick had said, "that, in default of unanswerable arguments, it is
better to express one's self laconically, and not go beating about the
bush." The care of drawing it up had been intrusted to Prince Kaunitz.
"It was of importance," said the document, "to establish the commonwealth
of Poland on a solid basis whilst doing justice to the claims of the
three powers for services rendered against the insurrection." The king
and the senate protested. The troops of the allies surrounded Warsaw,
and the Diet, being convoked, ratified by a majority of two voices the
convention presented by the spoilers themselves. Catherine assigned to
herself three thousand square leagues, and one million five hundred
thousand souls, in Lithuania and Polish Livonia; Austria took possession
of two thousand five hundred square leagues, and more than two million
souls, in Red Russia and the Polish palatinates on the left of the
Vistula; the instigator and plotter of the whole business had been the
most modest of all; the treaty of partition brought Prussia only nine
hundred square leagues and eight hundred and sixty thousand souls, but he
found himself master of Prussian Poland and of a henceforth compact
territory. England had opposed, in Russia, the cession of Dantzick to
the Great Frederick. "The ill-temper of France and England at the
dismemberment of Poland calls for serious reflections," wrote the King of
Prussia on the 5th of August, 1772: "these two courts are already moving
heaven and earth to detach the court of Vienna from our system; but as
the three chief points whence their support should come are altogether to
seek in France, and there is neither system, nor stability, nor money
there, her projects will be given up with the same facility with which
they were conceived and broached. They appear to me, moreover, like the
projects of the Duke of Aiguillon, ebullitions of French vivacity."

France did not do anything, and could not do anything; the king's secret
negotiators, as well as the minister of foreign affairs, had been tricked
by the allied powers. "Ah! if Choiseul had been here!" exclaimed King
Louis XV., it is said, when he heard of the partition of Poland. The
Duke of Choiseul would no doubt have been more clear-sighted and better
informed than the Duke of Aiguillon, but his policy could have done no
good. Frederick II. knew that. "France plays so small a part in
Europe," he wrote to C