Difficulties from an unexpected quarter added to the confusion into which, as the result of the Act of 1711, the Post Office was drifting. As soon as peace was declared, it became necessary to arrive at an agreement with France as to the conditions on which the British mails should pass through French territory. M. Pajot was still comptroller of the posts in Paris; and he proved to be hardly less untractable than before the war. Frankland and Evelyn committed their case to the care of Matthew Prior, who was at that time minister plenipotentiary to the Court of France. Prior, who had hated his commissionership of customs because, as Swift tells us, he was ever dreaming of cockets and dockets and other jargon, could hardly be expected to give his mind to anything so prosaic as postage and letter bills. The matter, moreover, was one of a highly technical character, and, without fuller information than could be contained in the most precise instructions, a far abler negotiator than Prior could claim to be might easily have found himself overmatched. Pajot, presuming on his superior knowledge, put forward the most extravagant demands; and it was not until an expert had been sent from London, upon whom it would have been useless to attempt to impose, that he abated his pretensions. Extravagant demands were now followed by frivolous objections, and at the last moment, when the conditions were practically settled, he actually refused to proceed further unless "Her Britannic Majesty," an expression employed in the Post Office treaty, were altered to "The Queen of Great Britain." Vexatious as these proceedings were, the result was more vexatious still. Before the war a lump sum of 36,000 livres a year had been paid for the transit of the British mails across French territory. Pajot now refused to accept any lump sum at all. He insisted that each letter passing through France should be charged for separately, according to the French postage; and high as the English postage was, the French postage was higher still. In vain the postmasters-general pointed out that by virtue of such an arrangement they would on many letters have to pay more than Act of Parliament permitted them to receive. Pajot replied in effect that this was their affair and not his; and no better terms could they get. The treaty was eventually signed, and its onerous provisions will best be shewn by an example. On a single letter from Italy the postage prescribed by the Act of 1711 was fifteenpence, and on a letter weighing one ounce sixty pence. This was all which the Act permitted the postmasters-general to collect; and yet, under the terms of the treaty, the postage for which they had to account to the French Post Office was in the one case twenty-one sous and in the other eighty-four.