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Updated: May 28, 2025
Concessions wrested from the weakness and irresolution of governments do not strengthen their failing powers. Brienne had exhausted his boldness as well as his basenesses; he succumbed beneath the outcry of public wrath and mistrust. He offered the comptroller-generalship to M. Necker, who refused.
We stop to look upon the picture of Monsieur Necker, the father, a strong, noble-looking man; of the mother, in white silk dress, with powdered hair, and very beautiful; and De Staël herself, in a brownish yellow dress, with low neck and short sleeves, holding in her hand the branch of flowers, which she always carried, or a leaf, that thus her hands might be employed while she engaged in the conversation that astonished Europe.
The count had since employed the controller of his own household, M. Boutourlin, to write pamphlets against him, and, in point of fact, many of the most elaborate details of a financial statement which Necker had recently published were very ill-calculated to endure a strict scrutiny; but M. Boutourlin did his work so badly that Necker had no difficulty in repelling him, and for a moment seemed the stronger for the attack that had been made upon him.
From M. Necker down to the lowest of the rabble, every one has been king except the king himself. Threats have been held out of depriving the king even of this empty title, and of shutting up the queen in a convent. In the nights of October, when it was proposed to the Assembly to go and protect the king by its presence, they declared it was beneath their dignity to do so.
Necker passing, perhaps by mere accident, stopped his carriage, and expressing himself with some resentment for such treatment to a Prince of the blood and a friend of the people, ordered the bust to be taken to the Palais Royal, where it was washed, crowned with laurel, and thence, with Necker's own bust, carried to Versailles.
So he escaped from Paris to Liège, whence he again attacked the administration of Calonne and the policy of Necker, declaring that loans should have been effected on methods less onerous for the state. His exile from Paris was of brief duration, for friends intervened. But Mirabeau returned only to renew and intensify his attacks.
Letter of Marie Antoinette describing her Interview with the Archbishop, and her Views. Necker refuses. The Queen sends Messages to Necker. The Archbishop resigns, and Necker becomes Minister. The Queen's View of his Character. General Rejoicing. Defects in Necker's Character. He recalls the Parliament. Riots in Paris. Severe Winter. General Distress. Charities of the King and Queen.
Breteuil, the rival of Necker, was the man preferred to Mirabeau. He was living at Soleure as the acknowledged head of the Royalists who served the king, and who declined to follow the princes and the émigrés and their chief intriguer Calonne. Breteuil was now consulted.
Necker envied the daughter's cleverness, even though that cleverness was little more, in the end, than the borrowing of brilliant things from other persons. At any rate, the two never cared for each other, and Germaine gave to her father the affection which her mother neither received nor sought. It was perhaps to tame the daughter's exuberance that a marriage was arranged for Mlle.
When, on the 11th, the news reached Paris that Louis had refused the assembly's demand for the withdrawal of the troops, the central committee of the sections took matters into its hands and voted the formation of a civic guard for the city of Paris. On the same day the King, now ready to precipitate the crisis, dismissed and exiled Necker, and called the reactionary Breteuil to power.
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