favor of taking charge of his letter.  He wrote the king, with the same coolness, a page and a half of thanks and regards, which he read out to them at once just as he had at once written it in their presence.  He handed it to the two dukes, together with the memorandum which the king had asked him for in the morning, and which he had just finished, sent word orally to his wife to come after him to L’Etang, whither he was going, without telling her why, sorted out his papers, and gave up his keys to be handed to his successor.  All this was done without the slightest excitement; without a sigh, a regret, a reproach, a complaint escaping him, he went down his staircase, got into his carriage, and started off to L’Etang, alone with his son, just as if nothing had happened to him, without anybody’s knowing anything about it at Versailles until long afterwards.” [Memoires de St. Simon, t. iii. p. 233.]

Desmarets in the finance and Voysin in the war department, both superintendents of finance, the former a nephew of Colbert’s and initiated into business by his uncle, both of them capable and assiduous, succumbed, like their predecessors, beneath the weight of the burdens which were overwhelming and ruining France.  “I know the state of my finances,” Louis XIV. had said to Desmarets; “I do not ask you to do impossibilities; if you succeed, you will render me a great service; if you are not successful, I shall not hold you to blame for circumstances.”  Desmarets succeeded better than could have been expected without being able to rehabilitate the finances of the state.  Pontchartrain had exhausted the resource of creating new offices.  “Every time your Majesty creates a new post, a fool is found to buy it,” he had said to the king.  Desmarets had recourse to the bankers; and the king seconded him by the gracious favor with which he received at Versailles the greatest of the collectors (traitants), Samuel Bernard.  “By this means everything was provided for up to the time of the general peace,” says M. d’Argenson.  France kept up the contest to the end.  When the treaty of Utrecht was signed, the fleet was ruined and destroyed, the trade diminished by two thirds, the colonies lost or devastated by the war, the destitution in the country so frightful that orders had to be given to sow seed in the fields; the exportation of grain was forbidden on pain of death; meanwhile the peasantry were reduced to browse upon the grass in the roads and to tear the bark off the trees and eat it.  Thirty years had rolled by since the death of Colbert, twenty-two since that of Louvois; everything was going to perdition simultaneously; reverses in war and distress at home were uniting to overwhelm the aged king, alone upstanding amidst so many dead and so much ruin.

[Illustration:  Misery of the Peasantry——­543]