On this authentic evidence the Earl was anxious to make an effort, and Charles’s remark about going alone in an open boat was conditional—_s’il savait que sa présence seule fut utile en Angleterre_. But no energy, no hopes, no courage, could conquer the irresolution of France. By April Prince Charles was living, _très caché_, in Paris. Thus his long habit of hiding arose in the _incognito_ forced on him by the Ministers of Louis XV. The Prince, as he writes to his father (April 3, 1744), was ‘goin about with a single servant bying fish and other things, and squabling for a peney more or less.’ He was anxious to make the campaign in Flanders with the French army, ‘and it will certainly be so if Lord Marschal dose not hinder it.... He tels them that serving in the Army in flanders, it would disgust entirely the English,’ in which opinion the Earl may have been wrong. Charles accuses the Earl of stopping the Dunkirk expedition (and here d’Alembert confirms), ‘by saying things that discouraged them to the last degree: I was plagued with his letters, which were rather Books, and had the patience to answer them, article by article, striving to make him act reasonably, but all to no purpose.’[17] It was not easy to ‘act reasonably,’ where all was a chaos of futile counsels and half-hearted French schemes. They would and they would not, in the affair of the expedition of March 1744. We find the Earl now urging despatch, now discouraging the French, and, on September 5, 1744, he writes to James, from Avignon, ‘there was not only no design to employ me, but there was none to any assistance in Scotland.’[18] The Earl believed that the Prince’s incognito was really imposed on him by the devices of Balhaldie and Sempil, ‘to keep him from seeing such as from honour and duty would tell him truth.’