Victor Amadeo was released; his wife, detained in shameful captivity, was restored to him; he died soon afterwards in that same castle of Pontarlier, whence he had been carried off without a voice being raised in his favor by the princes who were bound to him by the closest ties of blood.
The efforts made in common by Fleury and Robert Walpole, prime minister of the King of England, had for a long while been successful in maintaining the general peace; the unforeseen death of Augustus of Saxony, King of Poland, suddenly came to trouble it.

It was, thenceforth, the unhappy fate of Poland to be a constant source of commotion and discord in Europe.

The Elector of Saxony, son of Augustus H., was supported by Austria and Russia; the national party in Poland invited Stanislaus Leckzinski; he was elected at the Diet by sixty thousand men of family, and set out to take possession of the throne, reckoning upon the promises of his son-in-law, and on the military spirit which was reviving in France.

The young men burned to win their spurs; the old generals of Louis XIV.

were tired of idleness.
The ardor of Cardinal Fleury did not respond to that of the friends of King Stanislaus.