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France, exhausted of men, does not give to him, either in Maurepas, Necker, or Calonne, a minister capable of supporting him. The aristocracy is barren, and produces nothing but to its shame; the government must be renewed in the holier and deeper fount of the nation; the time for a democracy is here, why delay it! You are its men, its virtues, its characters, its intelligence.
It was necessary that an extraordinary movement should be made; and Calonne recommended the assembling of the Notables, a body composed chiefly of the nobility, clergy, and magistracy, with the hope that these aristocrats would consent to their own taxation.
The jealousy of Louis was excited, and he feared the domination of a man of whom the general opinion of posterity has been that he was wanting in decision. Calonne was sent away as soon as he tried to turn from extravagance to economy.
The Queen discerned a party spirit in these combinations, and sided wholly with his enemies. After those inefficient comptrollers-general, Messieurs Joly de Fleury and d'Ormesson, it became necessary to resort to a man of more acknowledged talent, and the Queen's friends, at that time combining with the Comte d'Artois and with M. de Vergennes, got M. de Calonne appointed.
"He is heavy and cold," he replied; "but you see there are still steady, good sort of people in the provinces, who are quite in earnest about political theories, and the history of France. It is a leaven that will work yet." "Is your carriage here?" asked Madame de St James. "No" I replied coldly. "You wished me, perhaps, to take M. de Calonne home?"
In consequence of our going every season to take the mineral waters and use the baths at Valdagno, we had often occasion to be in company with M. de Calonne, both at Vicenza and Valdagno, where I must do him the justice to say he conducted himself with the greatest circumspection in speaking of the Revolution.
The Queen did not sufficiently conceal the dissatisfaction she felt at having been unable to prevent the appointment of M. de Calonne; she even one day went so far as to say at the Duchess's, in the midst of the partisans and protectors of that minister, that the finances of France passed alternately from the hands of an honest man without talent into those of a skilful knave.
"Through the private correspondence which was carried on between this country and England, after I had left it, I was informed that M. de Calonne, whom the Queen never liked, and who was called to the administration against her will which he knew, and consequently became one of her secret enemies in the affair of the necklace was discovered to have been actively employed against Her Majesty in the work published in London by Lamotte.
This disclosure was the signal for Calonne's fall. He fell, and was succeeded by Brienne, archbishop of Sens, his opponent in the assembly. Brienne thought the majority of the notables was devoted to him, because it had united with him against Calonne.
The surgeon, who was half tipsy, Lavoisier Beaumarchais, and I, were the only ones who had listened. M. de Calonne was flirting with his neighbour. At that moment there was something solemn in the silence. The candles themselves seemed to me to burn with a magic dimness.
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