It cannot be too clearly remembered that to French statesmen in 1745 the decline of Austria had not yet begun.[376] Fondly had they dreamed of the ruin of her dominion; they woke up to find that in the person of Maria Theresa the Hapsburg dynasty had renewed its youth. The Austrian succession had been maintained in arms; and it would never even have been questioned had it not been for Frederick's seizure of Silesia. As to Frederick himself we have to beware of misconceptions; for in much of French criticism with regard to him we recognise the impressions of 1763--or even of 1870. No one suspected what was in the man, and it was not until December, 1745, that people began to think of him as "the Great." Only three months before the campaign in Saxony, which won from his people and wrung from his enemies that noble salutation, he was described by the oldest of his admirers, d'Argenson himself, as "a man who _might have been great_."[377] It was not until after the Treaty of Dresden that he ceased to be looked upon as merely an able and unscrupulous prince who had wantonly provoked the resentment of his neighbours, and who had only to be abandoned by his one ally to receive the punishment his insolence had deserved. When, in the previous September, the Empress, at the cost of some of her Flemish provinces, offered to purchase the withdrawal of France, neither she nor d'Argenson mistook for a moment the real meaning of the proposal. In all human probability Frederick would have been doomed. Those who suggest that the "traitor of Hanover" should have been abandoned to his fate, forget the sublime capacity for vengeance with which men like Frederick are endowed. If such a man had yielded to the Empress the sword of Prussia, it would have been to receive it back as the sword of the Empire. The Imperial troops, headed by the Prussians and commanded by the victor of Friedbourg, would have marched to wrest from the common enemy his ill-gotten provinces of Flanders and Lorraine; France might have taken the place of Saxony, and the pride of Paris been bitterly rebuked a hundred years before the time. D'Argenson may not have seen all this; but he was a statesman and a thinker, and he was wise enough to know that such cheap successes as the Empress offered him are often the very dearest of all. With an admirable moral courage, he maintained that nothing Frederick could do, no treason he might contrive, could lessen the interest of France in maintaining him in Silesia; and he would not allow the resentments of a month to obscure the tradition or the teaching of a century.