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.