The French officers
and men must not, Amherst insisted, serve again during the war.
Levis protested and begged Vaudreuil to be allowed to go on
fighting rather than accept the terms, but in vain. The
humiliation was rigorously imposed, and it was a sullen host
which the British took captive.
France had lost an Empire. It was nearly three years still before
peace was signed at Paris in 1763. To Britain France yielded
everything east of the Mississippi except New Orleans, and to
Spain she ceded New Orleans and everything else to which she had
any claim. The fleurs-de-lis floated still over only two tiny
fishing islands off the Newfoundland shore. All the glowing plans
of France's leaders--of Richelieu, of Louis XIV, of Colbert, of
Frontenac, of the heroic missionaries of the Jesuit Order--seemed
to have come to nothing.
The fall of France did much to drag down her rival. Already was
America restless under control from Europe. There was now no
danger to the English in America from the French peril which had
made insecure the borders of Massachusetts, of New York, of
Pennsylvania, and Virginia, and had brought widespread desolation
and sorrow.
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