sugar which, it was suspected, might have been tampered with, she thanked her, and praised M. Vicq-d’Azyr, the physician by whose instructions Madame Campan was acting, but told her that she was giving herself needless trouble.  “Depend upon it,” she added, “they will not employ a grain of poison against me.  The Brinvilliers[8] do not belong to this age; people now use calumny, which is much more effectual for killing people; and it is by calumny that they will work my destruction.[9] But even thus, if my death only secures the throne to my son, I shall willingly die.”

One of the measures which Mirabeau strongly urged, and as to which Marie Antoinette hesitated, balancing the difficulties to which it was not unlikely to give rise against the advantages which were more obvious, was arranged without her intervention.  Necker had but one panacea for all the ills of a defective constitution or an ill-regulated government—­the re-establishment of the finances of the country; and, as public confidence is indispensable to national credit, the troubles of the last year had largely increased the embarrassments of the Treasury.  He was also but scantily endowed with personal courage.  In the denunciations of Marat he had not been spared, and by the beginning of September fear had so predominated over every other feeling in his mind that he resolved to quit a country which, as he was not one of her sons, seemed to him to have no such claim on his allegiance that he should imperil his life for her sake.  But in carrying out his determination, he exhibited a strange forgetfulness, not only of the respect due to his royal master as king, but also of all the ordinary rules of propriety; for he did not resign his office into the hands of the sovereign from whom he had received it, but he announced his retirement to the Assembly, sending the president of the week a letter in which he attributed his reasons for the step partly to his health, which he described as weak, and partly to the “mortal anxieties of his wife, as virtuous as she was dear to his heart.”  It was hardly to be wondered at that the members present were moved rather to laughter than to sympathy by this sentimental effusion.  They took no notice of the letter, and passed to the order of the day; and certainly, if it afforded evidence of his amiable disposition, it supplied proof at least equally strong of the weakness of his character, and of his consequent unfitness for any post of responsibility at such a time.

It was more to his credit that he at the same time placed in the treasury a sum of two millions of francs to cover any incorrectness which might be discovered or suspected in his accounts, and any loss which might be sustained from the depreciation of the paper money lately issued under his administration, though not with his approbation.  All the rest of his colleagues retired at the same time, except the foreign secretary, M. Montmorin.  They had recently been attacked