opinion, it must be enlightened, it must be summoned to the aid of ideas
which concern the happiness of men."

M. Necker thought the moment had come for giving public opinion the
summons of which he recognized the necessity he felt himself shaken at
court, weakened in the regard of M. de Maurepas, who was still puissant
in spite of his great age, and jealous of him as he had been of M.
Turgot; he had made up his mind, he said, to let the nation know how its
affairs had been managed, and in the early days of the year 1781 he
published his _Compte rendu au roi_.

It was a bold innovation; hitherto the administration of the finances had
been carefully concealed from the eyes of the public as the greatest
secret in the affairs of state; for the first time the nation was called
upon to take cognizance of the position of the public estate, and,
consequently, pass judgment upon its administration.  "The principal
cause of the financial prosperity of England, in the very midst of war,
said the minister, "is to be found in the confidence with which the
English regard their administration and the source of the government's
credit."  The annual publication of a financial report was, M. Necker
thought, likely to inspire the same confidence in France.  It was paying
a great compliment to public opinion to attribute to it the power derived
from free institutions and to expect from satisfied curiosity the serious
results of a control as active as it was minute.

The Report to the king was, moreover, not of a nature to stand the
investigation of a parliamentary committee.  In publishing it M. Necker
had a double end in view.  He wanted, by an able exposition of the
condition of the treasury, to steady the public credit which was
beginning to totter, to bring in fresh subscribers for the loans which
were so necessary to support the charges of the war; he wanted at the
same time to call to mind the benefits and successes of his own
administration, to restore the courage of his friends and reduce his
enemies to silence.  With this complication of intentions, he had drawn
up a report on the ordinary state of expenditure and receipts, designedly
omitting the immense sacrifices demanded by the land and sea armaments as
well as the advances made to the United States.  He thus arrived, by a
process rather ingenious than honest, at the establishment of a budget
showing a surplus of ten million livres.  The maliciousness of M. de
Maurepas found a field for its exercise in the calculations which he had
officially overhauled in council.  The Report was in a cover of blue
marbled paper.  Have you read the _Conte bleu_ (a lying story)?"  he
asked everybody who went to see him; and, when he was told of the great
effect which M. Necker's work was producing on the public: "I know, I
know," said the veteran minister, shrugging his shoulders, "we have
fallen from Turgomancy into Necromancy."

M. Necker had boldly defied the malevolence of his enemies.  "I have
never," said he, "offered sacrifice to influence or power.  I have
disdained to indulge vanity.  I have renounced the sweetest of private
pleasures, that of serving my friends or winning the gratitude of those
who are about me.  If anybody owes to my mere favor a place, a post, let
us have the name."  He enumerated all the services he had rendered to the
king, to the state, to the nation, with that somewhat pompous
satisfaction which was afterwards discernible in his Memoires.  There it
was that he wrote: "Perhaps he who contributed, by his energies, to keep
off new imposts during five such expensive years; he who was able to
devote to all useful works the funds which had been employed upon them in
the most tranquil times; he who gratified the king's heart by providing
him with the means of distributing among his provinces the same aids as
during the war, and even greater; he who, at the same time, proffered to
the monarch's amiable impatience the resources necessary in order to
commence, in the midst of war, the improvement of the prisons and the
hospitals; he who indulged his generous inclinations by inspiring him
with the desire of extinguishing the remnants of serfage; he who,
rendering homage to the monarch's character, seconded his disposition
towards order and economy; he who pleaded for the establishment of
paternal administrations in which the simplest dwellers in the
country-places might have some share; he who, by manifold cares, by
manifold details, caused the prince's name to be blest even in the hovels
of the poor,--perhaps such a servant has some right to dare, without
blushing, to point out, as one of the first rules of administration, love
and care for the people."

"On the whole," says M. Droz, with much justice, in his excellent
_Histoire du regne de Louis XVI.,_ "the Report was a very ingenious work,
which appeared to prove a great deal and proved nothing."  M. Necker,
however, had made no mistake about the effect which might be produced by
this confidence, apparently so bold, as to the condition of affairs in a
single year, 1781, the loans amounted to two hundred and thirty-six
millions, thus exceeding in a few months the figures reached in the four
previous years.  A chorus of praises arose even in England, reflected
from the minister on to his sovereign.  "It is in economy," said Mr.
Burke, "that Louis XVI. has found resources sufficient to keep up the
war.  In the first two years of this war, he imposed no burden on his
people.  The third year has arrived, there has as yet been no question of
any impost, indeed I believe that those which are a matter of course in
time of war have not yet been put on.  I apprehend that in the long run
it will no doubt be necessary for France to have recourse to imposts, but
these three years saved will scatter their beneficent influence over a
whole century.  The French people feel the blessing of having a master
and minister devoted to economy; economy has induced this monarch to
trench upon his own splendor rather than upon his people's subsistence.
He has found in the suppression of a great number of places a resource
for continuing the war without increasing his expenses.  He has stripped
himself of the magnificence and pomp of royalty, but he has manned a
navy; he has reduced the number of persons in his private service, but he
has increased that of his vessels.  Louis XVI., like a patriotic king,
has shown sufficient firmness to protect M. Necker, a foreigner, without
support or connection at court, who owes his elevation to nothing but his
own merit and the discernment of the sovereign who had sagacity enough to
discover him, and to his wisdom which can appreciate him.  It is a noble
example to follow: if we would conquer France, it is on this ground and
with her own weapons that we must fight her: economy and reforms."

It was those reforms, for which the English orator gave credit to
M. Necker and Louis XVI., that rendered the minister's fall more imminent
every day.  He had driven into coalition against him the powerful
influences of the courtiers, of the old families whose hereditary
destination was office in the administration, and of the parliament
everywhere irritated and anxious.  He had lessened the fortunes and
position of the two former classes, and his measures tended to strip the
magistracy of the authority whereof they were so jealous.  "When
circumstances require it," M. Necker had said in the Report, "the
augmentation of imposts is in the hands of the king, for it is the power
to order them which constitutes sovereign greatness;" and, in a secret
Memoire which saw publicity by perfidious means: "The imposts are at
their height, and minds are more than ever turned towards administrative
subjects.  The result is a restless and confused criticism which adds
constant fuel to the desire felt by the parliaments to have a hand in the
matter.  This feeling on their part becomes more and more manifest, and
they set to work, like all those bodies that wish to acquire power, by
speaking in the name of the people, calling themselves defenders of the
nation's rights; there can be no doubt but that, though they are strong
neither in knowledge nor in pure love for the well-being of the state,
they will put themselves forward on all occasions as long as they believe
that they are supported by public opinion.  It is necessary, therefore,
either to take this support away from them, or to prepare for repeated
contests which will disturb the tranquillity of your Majesty's reign, and
will lead successively either to a degradation of authority or to extreme
measures of which one cannot exactly estimate the consequences."

In order to apply a remedy to the evils he demonstrated as well as to
those which he foresaw, M. Necker had borrowed some shreds from the great
system of local assemblies devised by M. Turgot; he had proposed to the
king and already organized in Berry the formation of provincial
assemblies, recruited in every district (_generalite_) from among the
three orders of the noblesse, the clergy, and the third estate.  A part
of the members were to be chosen by the king; these were commissioned to
elect their colleagues, and the assembly was afterwards to fill up its
own vacancies as they occurred.  The provincial administration was thus
confided almost entirely to the assemblies.  That of Berry had already
abolished forced labor, and collected two hundred thousand livres by
voluntary contribution for objects of public utility.  The assembly of
Haute-Guyenne was in course of formation.  The districts (_generalites_)
of Grenoble, Montauban, and Moulins claimed the same privilege.  The
parliaments were wroth to see this assault upon their power.  Louis XVI.
had hesitated a long while before authorizing the attempt.  "The
presidents-born, the councillors, the members of the states-districts
(_pays d'etats_), do not add to the happiness of Frenchmen in the
districts which are under their administration," wrote the king in his
marginal notes to M. Necker's scheme.  "Most certainly Brittany, with its
states, is not happier than Normandy which happens to be without them.
The most just and most natural among the powers of the parliaments is
that of hanging robbers of the finances.  In the event of provincial
administrations, it must not be taken away.  It concerns and appertains
to the repose of my people to preserve privileges."

The instinct of absolute power and the traditions of the kingship
struggled in the narrow mind and honest heart of Louis XVI. against the
sincere desire to ameliorate the position of his people and against a
vague impression of new requirements.  It was to the former of these
motives that M. de Vergennes appealed in his Note to the king on the
effect of the Report.  "Your Majesty," he said, "is enjoying the
tranquillity which you owe to the long experience of your ancestors, and
to the painful labors of the great ministers who succeeded in
establishing subordination and general respect in France.  There is no
longer in France clergy, or noblesse, or third estate; the distinction is
factitious, merely representative and without real meaning; the monarch
speaks, all else are people, and all else obey.

"M. Necker does not appear content with this happy state of things.  Our
inevitable evils and the abuses flowing from such a position are in his
eyes monstrosities; a foreigner, a republican, and a Protestant, instead
of being struck with the majestic totality of this harmony, he sees only
the discordants, and he makes out of them a totality which he desires to
have the pleasure and the distinction of reforming in order to obtain for
himself the fame of a Solon or a Lycurgus.

"Your Majesty, Sir, told me to open my heart to you: a contest has begun
between the regimen of France and the regimen of M. Necker.  If his ideas
should triumph over those which have been consecrated by long experience,
after the precedent of Law, of Mazarin, and of the Lorraine princes,
M. Necker, with his Genevese and Protestant plans, is quite prepared to
set up in France a system in the finance, or a league in the state, or a
'Fronde' against the established administration.  He has conducted the
king's affairs in a manner so contrary to that of his predecessors that
he is at this moment suspected by the clergy, hateful to the grandees of
the state, hounded to the death by the heads of finance (_la haute
finance_), dishonored amongst the magistracy.  His Report, on the whole,
is a mere appeal to the people, the pernicious consequences whereof to
this monarchy cannot as yet be felt or foreseen.  M. Necker, it is true,
has won golden opinions from the philosophy and the innovators of these
days, but your Majesty has long ago appraised the character of such
support.  In his Report M. Necker lays it down that advantage has been
taken of the veil drawn over the state of the finances in order to
obtain, amidst the general confusion, a credit which the state would not
otherwise be entitled to.  It is a new position, and a remarkable one in
our history is that of M. Necker teaching the party he calls public
opinion that under a good king, under a monarch beloved of the people,
the minister of finance has become the sole hope, the sole security, by
his moral qualities, of the lenders and experts who watch the government.
It will be long before your Majesty will close up the wound inflicted
upon the dignity of the throne by the hand of the very person in the
official position to preserve it and make it respected by the people."

The adroit malevolence of M. de Vergennes had managed to involve in one
and the same condemnation the bold innovations of M. Necker and the
faults he had committed from a self-conceit which was sensitive and
frequently hurt.  He, had not mentioned M. de Maurepas in his long
exposition of public administration, and it was upon the virtue of the
finance-minister that he had rested all the fabric of public confidence.
The contest was every day becoming fiercer and the parties warmer.  The
useful reforms, the generous concern for the woes and the wants of the
people, the initiative of which belonged to M. Necker, but which the king
always regarded with favor, were by turns exclusively attributed to the
minister and to Louis XVI. in the pamphlets published every day.  Madame
Necker became anxious and heartbroken at the vexation which such attacks
caused her husband.  "The slightest cloud upon his character was the
greatest suffering the affairs of life could cause him," writes Madame de
Stael; "the worldly aim of all his actions, the land-breeze which sped
his bark, was love of reputation."  Madame Necker took it into her head
to write, without her husband's knowledge, to M. de Maurepas to complain
of the libels spread about against M. Necker, and ask him to take the
necessary measures against these anonymous publications this was
appealing to the very man who secretly encouraged them..  Although Madame
Necker had plenty of wits, she, bred in the mountains of Switzerland, had
no conception of such an idiosyncrasy as that of M. de Maurepas, a man
who saw in an outspoken expression of feeling only an opportunity of
discovering the vulnerable point.  As soon as he knew M. Necker's
susceptibility he flattered himself that, by irritating it, he would
drive him to give in his resignation."  [_onsiderations sur la Revolution
frangaise,_t. i.  p. 105.]

M. Necker had gained a victory over M. de Maurepas when he succeeded in
getting M. de Sartines and the Prince of Montbarrey superseded by MM. de
Castries and de Segur.  Late lieutenant of police, with no knowledge of
administration, M. de Sartines, by turns rash and hesitating, had failed
in the difficult department of the ministry of marine during a distant
war waged on every sea; to him were attributed the unsatisfatory results
obtained by the great armaments of France; he was engaged in the intrigue
against M. Necker.  The latter relied upon the influence of the queen,
who supported MM. de Castries and de Segur, both friends of hers.  M. de
Sartines was disgraced; he dragged down with him in his fall the Prince
of Montbarrey, the heretofore indifferent lieutenant of M. de Saint-
Germain.  M. de Maurepas was growing feeble, the friends of M. Necker
declared that he drivelled, and the latter already aspired to the aged
minister's place.  As a first step, the director-general of finance
boldly demanded to be henceforth admitted to the council.

Louis XVI. hesitated, perplexed and buffeted between contrary influences
and desires.  He was grateful to M. Necker for the courageous
suppressions he had accomplished, and for the useful reforms whereof the
honor was to remain inseparable from his name; it was at M. Necker's
advice that he had abolished mortmain in his dominions.  A remnant of
feudal serfdom still deprived certain of the rural classes, subject to
the tenement law, of the right to marry or bequeath what they possessed
to their children without permission of their lord.  If they left the
land which made them liable to this tyranny, their heritage reverted of
right to the proprietor of the fief.  Perfectly admitting the iniquity of
the practice, Louis XVI. did not want to strike a blow at the principle
of property; he confined himself to giving a precedent which the
Parliament enregistered with this reservation: "Without there being
anything in the present edict which can in any way interfere with the
rights of lords."  A considerable number of noblemen imitated the
sovereign; many held out, amongst others the chapter of St. Claude; the
enfranchisement of the serfs of the Jura, in whose favor Voltaire had but
lately pleaded, would have cost the chapter twenty-five thousand livres a
year; the monks demanded an indemnification from government.  The body
serfs, who were in all places persecuted by the signiorial rights, and
who could not make wills even on free soil, found themselves everywhere
enfranchised from this harsh law.  Louis XVI. abolished the _droit de
suite_ (henchman-law), as well as the use of the preparatory question or
preliminary torture applied to defendants.  The regimen of prisons was at
the same time ameliorated, the dark dungeons of old times restored to
daylight the wretches who were still confined in them.

So many useful and beneficent measures, in harmony with the king's honest
and generous desires, but opposed to the prejudices still potent in many
minds and against the interests of many people, kept up about M. Necker,
for all the esteem and confidence of the general public, powerful
hatreds, ably served: his admission to the council was decidedly refused.
"You may be admitted," said M. de Maurepas with his, usual malice, "if
you please to abjure the errors of Calvin."  M. Necker did not deign to
reply.  "You who, being quite certain that I would not consent, proposed
to me a change of religion in order to smooth away the obstacles you put
in my path," says M. Necker in his Memoires, "what would you not have
thought me worthy of after such baseness?  It was rather in respect of
the vast finance-administration that this scruple should have been
raised.  Up to the moment when it was intrusted to me, it was uncertain
whether I was worth an exception to the general rules.  What new
obligation could be imposed upon him who held the post before promising?"

"If I was passionately attached to the place I occupied," says M: Necker
again, "it is on grounds for which I have no reason to blush.  I
considered that the administrator of finance, who is responsible on his
honor for ways and means, ought, for the welfare of the state and for his
own reputation, to be invited, especially after several years' ministry,
to the deliberations touching peace and war, and I looked upon it as very
important that he should be able to join his reflections to those of the
king's other servants: A place in the council may, as a general rule, be
a matter in which self-love is interested; but I am going to say a proud
thing: when one has cherished another passion, when one has sought praise
and glory, when one has followed after those triumphs which belong to
one's self alone, one regards rather coolly such functions as are shared
with others."

"Your Majesty saw that M. Necker, in his dangerous proposal, was sticking
to his place with a tenacity which lacks neither reason nor method," said
M. de Vergennes in a secret Note addressed to the king; "he aspires to
new favors, calculated from their nature to scare and rouse that long
array of enemies by whom his religion, his birth, his wife, the epochs
and improvements of their fortune, are, at every moment of his
administration, exposed to the laughter or the scrutiny of the public.
Your Majesty finds yourself once more in the position in which you were
with respect to M. Turgot, when you thought proper to accelerate his
retirement; the same dangers and the same inconveniences arise from the
nature of their analogous systems."

It was paying M. Necker a great compliment to set his financial talents
on a par with the grand views, noble schemes, and absolute
disinterestedness of M. Turgot.  Nevertheless, when the latter fell,
public opinion had become, if not hostile, at any rate indifferent to
him; it still remained faithful to M. Necker.  Withdrawing his
pretensions to admission into the council, the director-general of
finance was very urgent to obtain other marks of the royal confidence,
necessary, he said, to keep up the authority of his administration.
M. de Maurepas had no longer the pretext of religion, but he hit upon
others which wounded M. Necker deeply; the latter wrote to the king on a
small sheet of common paper, without heading or separate line, and as if
he were suddenly resuming all the forms of republicanism: "The
conversation I have had with M. de Maurepas permits me to no longer defer
placing my resignation in the king's hands.  I feel my heart quite
lacerated by it, and I dare to hope that his Majesty will deign to.
preserve some remembrance of five years' successful but painful toil, and
especially of the boundless zeal with which I devoted myself to his
service."  [May 19, 1783.]

M. Necker had been treated less harshly than M. Turgot.  The king
accepted his resignation without having provoked it.  The queen made some
efforts to retain him, but M. Necker remained inflexible.  "Reserved as
he was," says his daughter, "he had a proud disposition, a sensitive
spirit; he was a man of energy in his whole style of sentiments."  The
fallen minister retired to his country-house at St. Ouen.

He was accompanied thither by the respect and regret of the public, and
the most touching proofs of their esteem.  "You would have said, to see
the universal astonishment, that never was news so unexpected as that of
M. Necker's resignation," writes Grimm in his _Correspondance
litteraire;_ "consternation was depicted on every face; those who felt
otherwise were in a very small minority; they would have blushed to show
it.  The walks, the cafes, all the public thoroughfares were full of
people, but an extraordinary silence prevailed.  People looked at one
another, and mournfully wrung one another's hands, as if in the presence,
I would say, of a public calamity, were it not that these first moments
of distress resembled rather the grief of a disconsolate family which has
just lost the object and the mainstay of its hopes.  The same evening
they gave, at the Comedie-Francaise, a performance of the _Partie de
Chasse de Henri IV_.  I have often seen at the play in Paris allusions to
passing events caught up with great cleverness, but I never saw any which
were so with such palpable and general an interest.  Every piece of
applause, when there was anything concerning Sully, seemed, so to speak,
to bear a special character, a shade appropriate to the sentiment the
audience felt; it was by turns that of sorrow and sadness, of gratitude
and respect; the applause often came so as to interrupt the actor the
moment it was foreseen that the sequel of a speech might be applicable to
the public feeling towards M. Necker.  The players have been to make
their excuses to the lieutenant of police, they established their
innocence by proving that the piece had been on the list for a week.
They have been forgiven, and it was thought enough to take this
opportunity of warning the journalists not to speak of M. Necker for the
future-well or ill."

M. Necker derived some balm from these manifestations of public feeling,
but the love of power, the ambition that prompted the work he had
undertaken, the bitterness of hopes deceived still possessed his soul.
When he entered his study at St. Ouen, and saw on his desk the memoranda
of his schemes, his plans for reforming the gabel, for suppressing
custom-houses, for extending provincial assemblies, he threw himself back
in his arm-chair, and, dropping the papers he held in his hand, burst
into tears.  Like him, M. Turgot had wept when he heard of the
re-establishment of forced labor and jurands.

"I quitted office," says M. Necker, "leaving funds secured for a whole
year; I quitted it when there were in the royal treasury more ready money
and more realizable effects than had ever been there within the memory of
man, and at a moment when the public confidence, completely restored, had
risen to the highest pitch.

"Under other circumstances I should have been more appreciated; but it is
when one can be rejected and when one is no longer essentially necessary
that one is permitted to fall back upon one's own reflections.  Now there
is a contemptible feeling which may be easily found lurking in the
recesses of the human heart, that of preferring for one's retirement the
moment at which one might enjoy the embarrassment of one's successor.  I
should have been forever ashamed of such conduct; I chose that which was
alone becoming for him who, having clung to his place from honorable
motives, cannot, on quitting it, sever himself for one instant from the
commonwealth."

M. Necker fell with the fixed intention and firm hope of soon regaining
power.  He had not calculated either the strength or inveteracy of his
enemies, or the changeableness of that public opinion on which he relied.
Before the distresses of the state forced Louis XVI. to recall a minister
whom he had deeply wounded, the evils which the latter had sought to
palliate would have increased with frightful rapidity, and the remedy
would have slipped definitively out of hands too feeble for the immense
burden they were still ambitious to bear.




CHAPTER LIX.----LOUIS XVI.--M. DE CALONNE AND THE ASSEMBLY OF NOTABLES.
1781-1787.

We leave behind us the great and serious attempts at reform.  The vast
projects of M. Turgot, seriously meant and founded on reason, for all
their somewhat imaginative range, had become, in M. Necker's hands,
financial expedients or necessary remedies, honorably applied to the most
salient evils; the future, however, occupied the mind of the minister
just fallen; he did not content himself with the facile gratifications of
a temporary and disputed power, he had wanted to reform, he had hoped to
found; his successors did not raise so high their real desires and hopes.
M. Turgot had believed in the eternal potency of abstract laws; he had
relied upon justice and reason to stop the kingdom and the nation on the
brink of the abyss; M. Necker had nursed the illusion that his courage
and his intelligence, his probity and his reputation would suffice for
all needs and exorcise all dangers; both of them had found themselves
thwarted in their projects, deceived in their hopes, and finally
abandoned by a monarch as weak and undecided as he was honest and good.
M. de Turgot had lately died (March 20, 1781), in bitter sorrow and
anxiety; M. Necker was waiting, in his retirement at St. Ouen, for public
opinion, bringing its weight to bear upon the king's will, to recall him
to office.  M. de Maurepas was laughing in that little closet at
Versailles which he hardly quitted any more: "The man impossible to
replace is still unborn," he would say to those who were alarmed at M.
Necker's resignation.  M. Joly de Fleury, councillor of state, was
summoned to the finance-department; but so strong was the current of
popular opinion that he did not take up his quarters in the residence of
the comptroller-general, and considered himself bound to pay M. Necker a
visit at St. Ouen.

Before experience had been long enough to demonstrate the error committed
by M. de Maurepas in depriving the king of M. Necker's able and honest
services, the veteran minister was dead (November 21, 1784).  In the
teeth of all inclinations opposed to his influence, he had managed to the
last to preserve his sway over the mind of Louis XVI.: prudent, moderate,
imperturbable in the evenness of his easy and at the same time sarcastic
temper, he had let slide, so far as he was concerned, the reformers and
their projects, the foreign war, the wrath of the parliaments, the
remonstrances of the clergy, without troubling himself at any shock,
without ever persisting to obstinacy in any course, ready to modify his
policy according to circumstances and the quarter from which the wind
blew, always master, at bottom, in the successive cabinets, and
preserving over all the ministers, whoever they might be, an ascendency
more real than it appeared.  The king regretted him sincerely.  "Ah!"
said he, "I shall no more hear, every morning, my friend over my head."
The influence of M. de Maurepas had often been fatal; he had remained,
however, like a pilot still holding with feeble hand the rudder he had
handled for so long.  After him, all direction and all predominance of
mind disappeared from the conduct of the government.  "The loss is more
than we can afford," said clear-sighted folks already.

For a moment, and almost without consideration, the king was tempted to
expand his wings and take the government into his own hands; he had a
liking for and confidence in M. de Vergennes; but the latter, a man of
capacity in the affairs of his own department and much esteemed in
Europe, was timid, devoid of ambition and always disposed to shift
responsibility into the hands of absolute power.  Notwithstanding some
bolder attempts, the death of M. de Maurepas did not seriously augment
his authority.  The financial difficulties went on getting worse; on
principle and from habit, the new comptroller-general, like M. de
Vergennes, was favorable to the traditional maxims and practices of the
old French administration; he was, however, dragged into the system of
loans by the necessities of the state, as well as by the ideas impressed
upon men's minds by M. Necker.  To loans succeeded imposts; the dues and
taxes were increased uniformly, without regard for privileges and the
burdens of different provinces; the Parliament of Paris, in the body of
which the comptroller-general counted many relatives and friends, had
enregistered the new edicts without difficulty; the Parliament of
Besangon protested, and its resistance went so far as to place the
comptroller-general on his defence.  "All that is done in my name is done
by my orders," replied Louis XVI. to the deputation from Franche-Comte.
The deputation required nothing less than the convocation of the
States-general.  On all sides the nation was clamoring after this ancient
remedy for their woes; the most clear-sighted had hardly a glimmering of
the transformation which had taken place in ideas as well as manners;
none had guessed what, in the reign of Louis XVI., those States-general
would be which had remained dumb since the regency of Mary de Medici.

Still more vehement and more proud than the Parliamentarians, the states
of Brittany, cited to elect the deputies indicated by the governor, had
refused any subsidy.  "Obey," said the king to the deputies; "my orders
have nothing in them contrary to the privileges which my predecessors
were graciously pleased to grant to my province of Brittany."  Scarcely
had the Bretons returned to the states, when M. Amelot, who had charge of
the affairs of Brittany, received a letter which he did not dare to place
before the king's eyes.  "Sir," said the states of Brittany, "we are
alarmed and troubled when we see our franchises and our liberties,
conditions essential to the contract which gives you Brittany, regarded
as mere privileges, founded upon a special concession.  We cannot hide
from you, Sir, the direful consequences of expressions so opposed to the
constant principles of our national code.  You are the father of your
people, and exercise no sway but that of the laws; they rule by you and
you by them.  The conditions which secure to you our allegiance form a
part of the positive laws of your realm."  Contrary to all received
usages during the session of the states, the royal troops marched into
Rennes; the noblesse refused to deliberate, so long as the assembly had
not recovered its independence.  The governor applied to the petty nobles
who preponderated in their order; ignorant and poor as they were, they
allowed themselves to be bought, their votes carried the day, and the
subsidies were at last voted, notwithstanding the opposition on the part
of the most weighty of the noblesse; a hundred of them persistently staid
away.

Internal quarrels in the cabinet rendered the comptroller-general's
situation daily more precarious; he gave in his resignation.  The king
sent for M. d'Ormesson, councillor of state, of a virtue and integrity
which were traditional in his family, but without experience of affairs
and without any great natural capacity.  He was, besides, very young, and
he excused himself from accepting such a post on the score of his age and
his feeble lights.  "I am only thirty-one, Sir," he said.  "I am younger
than you," replied the king, "and my post is more difficult than yours."
A few months later, the honest magistrate, overwhelmed by a task beyond
his strength, had made up his mind to resign; he did not want to have any
hand in the growing disorder of the finances; the king's brothers kept
pressing him to pay their debts; Louis XVI. himself, without any warning
to the comptroller-general, had just purchased Rambouillet from the Duke
of Penthievre, giving a bond of fourteen millions; but Madame d'Ormesson
had taken a liking to grandeur; she begged her husband hard to remain,
and he did.  It was not long before the embarrassments of the treasury
upset his judgment: the tax-farming contract, so ably concluded by M.
Necker, was all at once quashed; a _regie_ was established; the Discount-
fund (_Caisse d'Escompte+) had lent the treasury six millions: the secret
of this loan was betrayed, and the holders of bills presented themselves
in a mass demanding liquidation; a decree of the council forbade payment
in coin over a hundred livres, and gave the bills a forced currency.  The
panic became general; the king found himself obliged to dismiss M.
d'Ormesson, who was persecuted for a long while by the witticisms of the
court.  His incapacity had brought his virtue into ridicule.

Marshal de Castries addressed to the king a private note.  "I esteem M.
d'Ormesson's probity," said the minister of marine frankly, "but if the
financial affairs should fall into such discredit that your Majesty finds
yourself forced at last to make a change, I dare entreat you to think of
the valuable man who is now left unemployed; I do beg you to reflect
that, without Colbert, Louis XIV. would never perhaps have been called
Louis le Grand; that the wish of the nation, to be taken into account by
a good king, is secretly demanding, Sir, that the enlightened,
economical, and incorruptible man whom Providence has given to your
Majesty, should be recalled to his late functions.  The errors of your
other ministers, Sir, are nearly always reparable, and their places are
easily filled.  But the choice of him to whom is committed the happiness
of twenty-four millions of souls and the duty of making your authority
cherished is of frightful importance.  With M. Necker, Sir, even in
peace, the imposts would be accepted, whatever they might be, without a
murmur.  The conviction would be that inevitable necessity had laid down
the laws for them, and that a wise use of them would justify them, .  .
.  whereas, if your Majesty puts to hazard an administration on which all
the rest depend, it is to be feared that the difficulties will be
multiplied with the selections you will be obliged to have recourse to;
you will find one day destroy what another set up, and at last there will
arrive one when no way will be seen of serving the state but by failing
to keep all your Majesty's engagements, and thereby putting an end to all
the confidence which the commencement of your reign inspired."

The honest zeal of Marshal de Castries for the welfare of the state had
inspired him with prophetic views; but royal weakness exhibits sometimes
unexpected doggedness.  "As regards M. Necker," answered Louis XVI., "I
will tell you frankly that after the manner in which I treated him and
that in which he left me, I couldn't think of employing him at all."
After some court-intrigues which brought forward names that were not in
good odor, that of Foulon, late superintendent of the forces, and of the
Archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne, the king sent for M. de
Calonne, superintendent of Lille, and intrusted him with the post of
comptroller-general.

It was court-influence that carried the day, and, in the court, that of
the queen, prompted by her favorite, Madame de Polignac.  Tenderly
attached to his wife, who had at last given him a son, Louis XVI.,
delivered from the predominant influence of M. de Maurepas, was yielding,
almost unconsciously, to a new power.  Marie Antoinette, who had long
held aloof from politics, henceforth changed her part; at the instigation
of the friends whom she honored with a perhaps excessive intimacy, she
began to take an important share in affairs, a share which was often
exaggerated by public opinion, more and more hard upon her every day.

Received on her arrival in France with some mistrust, of which she had
managed to get the better amongst the public, having been loved and
admired as long as she was dauphiness, the young queen, after her long
period of constraint in the royal family, had soon profited by her
freedom; she had a horror of etiquette, to which the court of Austria had
not made her accustomed; she gladly escaped from the grand palaces of
Louis XIV., where the traditions of his reign seemed still to exercise a
secret influence, in order to seek at her little manor-house of Trianon
new amusements and rustic pleasures, innocent and simple, and attended
with no other inconvenience but the air of cliquedom and almost of
mystery in which the queen's guests enveloped themselves.  Public rumor
soon reached the ears of Maria Theresa.  She, tenderly concerned for her
daughter's happiness and conduct, wrote to her on this subject:--

"I am always sure of success if you take anything in hand, the good God
having endowed you with such a face and so many charms besides, added to
your goodness, that hearts are yours if you try and exert yourself, but I
cannot conceal from you, nevertheless, my apprehension: it reaches me
from every quarter and only too often, that you have diminished your
attentions and politenesses in the matter of saying something agreeable
and becoming to everybody, and of making distinctions between persons.
It is even asserted that you are beginning to indulge in ridicule,
bursting out laughing in people's faces; this might do you infinite harm
and very properly, and even raise doubts as to the goodness of your
heart; in order to amuse five or six young ladies or gentlemen, you might
lose all else.  This defect, my dear child, is no light one in a
princess; it leads to imitation, in order to pay their court, on the part
of all the courtiers, folks ordinarily with nothing to do and the least
estimable in the state, and it keeps away honest folks who do not like
being turned into ridicule or exposed to the necessity of having their
feelings hurt, and in the end you are left with none but bad company,
which by degrees leads to all manner of vices.  .  .  .  Likings carried
too far are baseness or weakness; one must learn to play one's part
properly if one wishes to be esteemed; you can do it if you will but
restrain yourself a little and follow the advice given you; if you are
heedless, I foresee great troubles for you, nothing but squabbles and
petty cabals which will render your days miserable.  I wish to prevent
this and to conjure you to take the advice of a mother who knows the
world, who idolizes her children, and whose only desire is to pass her
sorrowful days in being of service to them."

Wise counsels of the most illustrious of mothers uselessly lavished upon
her daughters!  Already the Queen of Naples was beginning to betray the
fatal tendencies of her character; whilst, in France, frivolous
pleasures, unreflecting friendships, and petty court-intrigues were day
by day undermining the position of Marie Antoinette.  "I am much affected
at the situation of my daughter," wrote Maria Theresa, in 1776, to Abbe
Vermond, whom she had herself not long ago placed with the dauphiness,
then quite a child, and whose influence was often pernicious: "she is
hurrying at a great pace to her ruin, surrounded as she is by base
flatterers who urge her on for their own interests."

Almost at the same moment she was writing to the queen "I am very pleased
to learn that you had nothing to do with the change that has been made in
the cases of MM. Turgot and Malesherbes, who, however, have a great
reputation among the public and whose only fault, in my opinion, is that
they attempted too much at once.  You say that you are not sorry; you
must have your own good reasons, but the public, for some time past, has
not spoken so well of you, and attributes to you point blank petty
practices which would not be seemly in your place.  The king loving you,
his ministers must needs respect you; by asking nothing that is not right
and proper, you make yourself respected and loved at the same time.  I
fear nothing in your case (as you are so young) but too much dissipation.
You never did like reading, or any sort of application: this has often
caused me anxieties.  I was so pleased to see you devoted to music; that
is why I have often plagued you with questions about your reading.  For
more than a year past there has no longer been any question of reading or
of music; I hear of nothing but horse-racing, hunting too, and always
without the king and with a number of young people not over-select, which
disquiets me a great deal, loving you as I do so tenderly.  I must say,
all these pleasures in which the king takes no part, are not proper.  You
will tell me, 'he knows, he approves of them.'  I will tell you, he is a
good soul, and therefore you ought to be circumspect and combine your
amusements with his; in the long run you can only be happy through such
tender and sincere union and affection."

[Illustration: MARIE ANTOINETTE   456]

The misfortune and cruel pangs of their joint lives were alone destined
to establish between Marie Antoinette and her husband that union and that
intimacy which their wise mother would have liked to create in the days
of tranquillity.  Affectionate and kind, sincerely devoted to his wife,
Louis XVI. was abrupt and awkward; his occupations and his tastes were
opposed to all the elegant or frivolous instincts of the young queen.
He liked books and solid books; his cabinet was hung with geographical
charts which he studied with care; he had likewise a passion for
mechanical works, and would shut himself up for hours together in a
workshop in company with a blacksmith named Gamin.  "The king used to
hide from the queen and the court to forge and file with me," this man
would remark in after days: "to carry about his anvil and mine, without
anybody's knowing anything about it required a thousand stratagems which
it would take no end of time to tell of."  You will allow that I should
make a sorry figure at a forge," writes the queen to her brother Joseph
II.; "I should not be Vulcan, and the part of Venus might displease the
king more than those tastes of mine of which he does not disapprove."

Louis XVI. did not disapprove, but without approving.  As he was weak in
dealing with his ministers, from kindliness and habit, so he was towards
the queen with much better reason.  Whilst she was scampering to the
Opera ball, and laughing at going thither in a hackney coach one day when
her carriage had met with an accident, the king went to bed every evening
at the same hour, and the talk of the public began to mix up the name of
Marie Antoinette with stories of adventure.  In the hard winter of 1775,
whilst the court amused themselves by going about in elegantly got-up
sledges, the king sent presents of wood to the poor.  "There are my
sledges, sirs," said he as he pointed out to the gentlemen in attendance
the heavy wagons laden with logs.  The queen more gladly took part in the
charities than in the smithy.  She distributed alms bountifully; in a
moment of gratitude the inhabitants of Rue St. Honore had erected in her
honor a snow pyramid bearing these verses:

Fair queen, whose goodness is thy chiefest grace,
With our good king, here occupy thy place;
Though this frail monument be ice or snow,
Our warm hearts are not so.

[Illustration: "There are my Sledges, Sirs."----458]

Bursts of kindness and sympathy, sincere as they may be, do not suffice
to win the respect and affection of a people.  The reign of Louis XV.
had used up the remnants of traditional veneration, the new right of the
public to criticise sovereigns was being exercised malignantly upon the
youthful thoughtlessnesses of Marie Antoinette.

In the home circle of the royal family, the queen had not found any
intimate; the king's aunts had never taken to her; the crafty ability of
the Count of Provence and the giddiness of the Count of Artois seemed in
the prudent eye of Maria Theresa to be equally dangerous; Madame
Elizabeth, the heroic and pious companion of the evil days, was still a
mere child; already the Duke of Chartres, irreligious and debauched,
displayed towards the queen, who kept him at a distance, symptoms of a
bitter rancor which was destined to bear fruit.  Marie Antoinette,
accustomed to a numerous family, affectionately united, sought friends
who could "love her for herself," as she used to say: an illusive hope,
in one of her rank, for which she was destined to pay dearly.  She formed
an attachment to the young Princess of Lamballe, daughter-in-law of the
Duke of Penthievre, a widow at twenty years of age, affectionate and
gentle, for whom she revived the post of lady-superintendent, abolished
by Mary Leczinska.  The court was in commotion, and the public murmured;
the queen paid no heed, absorbed as she was in the new delights of
friendship; the intimacy, in which there was scarcely any inequality,
with the Princess of Lamballe, was soon followed by a more perilous
affection.  The Countess Jules de Polignac, who was generally detained
in the country by the narrowness of her means, appeared at court on the
occasion of a festival; the queen was pleased with her, made her remain,
and loaded her, her and her family, not only with favors, but with
unbounded and excessive familiarity.  Finding the court circles a
constraint and an annoyance, Marie Antoinette became accustomed to seek
in the drawing-room of Madame de Polignac amusements and a freedom which
led before long to sinister gossip.  Those who were admitted to this
royal intimacy were not always prudent or discreet, they abused the
confidence as well as the generous kindness of the queen; their ambition
and their cupidity were equally concerned in urging Marie Antoinette to
take in the government a part for which she was not naturally inclined.
M. de Calonne was intimate with Madame de Polignac; she, created a
duchess and appointed governess to the children of France (the royal
children), was all-powerful with her friend the queen; she dwelt upon
the talents of M. de Calonne, the extent and fertility of his resources;
M. de Vergennes was won over, and the office of comptroller-general,
which had but lately been still discharged with lustre by M. Turgot and
M. Necker, fell on the 30th of October, 1784, into the hands of M. de
Calonne.

Born in 1734 at Douai, Charles Alexander de Calonne belonged to a family
of magistrates of repute and influence in their province; he commenced
his hereditary career by the perfidious manoeuvres which contributed to