of misfortune he has a private reserve, his purse apart.  “The king,” said Mme. de Pompadour, “would sign away a million without thinking of it, but he would scarcely bestow a hundred louis out of his own little treasury.” — Louis XVI strives for some time to remove some of the wheels, to introduce better ones and to reduce the friction of the rest; but the pieces are too rusty, and too weighty.  He cannot adjust them, or harmonize them and keep them in their places; his hand falls by his side wearied and powerless.  He is content to practice economy himself; he records in his journal the mending of his watch, and leaves the State carriage in the hands of Calonne to be loaded with fresh abuses that it may revert back to the old rut from which it is to issue only by breaking down.

Undoubtedly the wrong they do, or which is done in their name, dissatisfies the kings and upsets them, but, at the bottom, their conscience is not disturbed.  They may feel compassion for the people, but they do not feel guilty; they are its sovereigns and not its representatives.  France, to them, is as a domain to its lord, and a lord is not deprived of honor in being prodigal and neglectful.  He merely gambles away his own property, and nobody has a right to call him to account.  Founded on feudal society, royalty is like an estate, an inheritance.  It would be infidelity, almost treachery in a prince, in any event weak and base, should he allow any portion of the trust received by him intact from his ancestors for transmission to his children, to pass into the hands of his subjects.  Not only according to medieval traditions is he proprietor-commandant of the French and of France, but again, according to the theory of the jurists, he is, like Caesar, the sole and perpetual representative of the nation, and, according to the theological doctrine, like David, the sacred and special delegate of God himself.  It would be astonishing, if, with all these titles, he did not consider the public revenue as his personal revenue, and if, in many cases, he did not act accordingly.  Our point of view, in this matter, is so essentially opposed to his, we can scarcely put ourselves in his place; but at that time his point of view was everybody’s point of view.  It seemed, then, as strange to meddle with the king’s business as to meddle with that of a private person.  Only at the end of the year 1788[37] the famous salon of the Palais-Royal “with boldness and unimaginable folly, asserts that in a true monarchy the revenues of the State should not be at the sovereign’s disposition; that he should be granted merely a sum sufficient to defray the expenses of his establishment, of his donations, and for favors to his servants as well as for his pleasures, while the surplus should be deposited in the royal treasury to be devoted only to purposes sanctioned by the National Assembly.  To reduce the sovereign to a civil list, to seize nine-tenths of his income, to forbid him cash on demand, what