clung to him.  His sole popularity was derived from the disgust inspired by his grandfather.  He occasionally had the esteem of his people, but never their favour.  Upright and well-informed, he called to him sterling honesty and clear intelligence in the person of Turgot.  But with the philosophic sentiment of the necessity of reforms, the prince had not the feeling of a reformer; he had neither the genius nor the boldness; nor had his ministers more than himself.  They raised all questions without settling any, accumulated storms, without giving them any impulse, and the tempests were doomed to be eventually directed against themselves.  From M. de Maurepas to M. Turgot, from M. Turgot to M. de Calonne, from M. de Calonne to M. Necker, from M. Necker to M. de Malesherbes, he floated from an honest man to an intriguant, from a philosopher to a banker, whilst the spirit of system and charlatanism ill supplied the spirit of government.  God, who had given many men of notoriety during this reign, had refused it a statesman; all was promise and deception.  The court clamoured, impatience seized on the nation, and violent convulsions followed.  The Assembly of Notables, States General, National Assembly, had all burst in the hands of royalty; a revolution emanated from his good intentions more fierce and more irritable than if it had been the consequence of his vices.  At the time when the king had this revolution before him in the National Assembly, he had not in his councils one man, not only capable of resisting but even of comprehending it.  Men really strong prefer in such moments to be rather the popular ministers of the nation than the bucklers of the king.

XI.

M. de Montmorin was devoted to the king, but had no credit with the nation.  The ministry had neither the initiative nor opposition; the initiative was in the hands of the Jacobins, and the executive power with the mob.  The king, without an organ, without privilege, without force, had merely the odious responsibility of anarchy.  He was the butt against which all parties directed the hate or rage of the people.  He had the privilege of every accusation; whilst from the tribune Mirabeau, Barnave, Petion, Lameth, and Robespierre, eloquently threatened the throne; infamous pamphlets, factious journals painted the king in the colours of a tyrant who was brutalised by wine, who lent himself to every caprice of an abandoned woman, and who conspired in the recesses of his palace with the enemies of the nation.  In the sinister feeling of his coming fall, the stoical virtue of this prince sufficed for the calming of his conscience, but was not adequate to his resolutions.  On leaving the council of his ministers, where he loyally accomplished the constitutional conditions of his character, he sought, sometimes in the friendship of his devoted servants, sometimes from the very persons of his enemies, admitted by stealth to his confidence, the most important