"The admiral is six foot every day," said the sailors, "on a fighting day he is six foot one." So much courage and desperation could not save the fleet, the count was forced to strike; his ship had received such damage that it sank before its arrival in England; the admiral was received in London with great honors against which his vanity was not proof, to the loss of his personal dignity and his reputation in Europe.
A national subscription in France reinforced the fleet with new vessels: a squadron, commanded by M.de Suffren, had just carried into the East Indies the French flag, which had so long been humiliated, and which his victorious hands were destined to hoist aloft again for a moment.
As early as 1778, even before the maritime war had burst out in Europe, France had lost all that remained of her possessions on the Coromandel coast.

Pondicherry, scarcely risen from its ruins, was besieged by the English, and had capitulated on the 17th of October, after an heroic resistance of forty days' open trenches.

Since that day a Mussulman, Hyder Ali, conqueror of the Carnatic, had struggled alone in India against the power of England: it was around him that a group had been formed by the old soldiers of Bussy and by the French who had escaped from the disaster of Pondicherry.

It was with their aid that the able robber-chief, the crafty politician, had defended and consolidated the empire he had founded against that foreign dominion which threatened the independence of his country.

He had just suffered a series of reverses, and he was on the point of being forced to evacuate the Carnatic and take refuge in his kingdom of Mysore, when he heard, in the month of July, 1782, of the arrival of a French fleet commanded by M.de Suffren.