e up such parts of Hanoverian territory as she had
occupied, and evacuated certain fortresses belonging to Prussia,
pledging herself at the same time to demolish, under the
inspection of English engineers, her own maritime fortress
of Dunkirk. In Africa France ceded Senegal, and received
back the small Island of Goree. In India she lost everything
she had gained since the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle; recovered
certain trading stations, but renounced the right of building
forts or maintaining troops in Bengal.

On the day when the preliminaries were signed, France
made a secret agreement with Spain, by which she divested
herself of the last shred of her possessions on the North
American continent. As compensation for Florida, which her
luckless ally had lost in her quarrel, she made over to the
Spanish Crown the city of New Orleans, and under the name
of Louisiana gave her the vast region spreading westward
from the Mississippi towards the Pacific.

On the ninth of December the question of approving the
preliminaries came up before both Houses of Parliament.
There was a long debate in the Commons. Pitt was not present,
confined, it was said, by gout; till late in the day the
House was startled by repeated cheers from the outside. The
doors opened, and the fallen Minister entered, carried in the
arms of his servants, and followed by an applauding crowd.
His bearers set him down within the bar, and by the help of
a crutch he made his way with difficulty to his seat. "There
was a mixture of the very solemn and the theatric in this apparition,"
says Walpole, who was present. "The moment was so well timed, the
importance of the man and his services, the languor of his emaciated
countenance, and the study bestowed on his dress were circumstances
that struck solemnity into a patriot mind, and did a little furnish
ridicule to the hardened and insensible. He was dressed in black
velvet, his legs and thighs wrapped in flannel, his feet covered with
buskins of black cloth, and his hands with thick gloves." Not
for the first time, he was utilizing his maladies for purposes
of stage effect. He spoke for about three hours, sometimes
standing, and sometimes seated; sometimes with a brief burst
of power, more often with the accents of pain and exhaustion.
He highly commended the retention of Canada, but denounced
the leaving to France a share in the fisheries, as well as other
advantages tending to a possible revival of her maritime