Intimately connected with the most esteemed magistrates and economists, such as MM.  Trudaine, Quesnay, and Gournay, at the same time that he was writing in the Encyclopaedia, and constantly occupied in useful work, Turgot was not yet five and thirty when he was appointed superintendent of the district of Limoges.  There, the rare faculties of his mind and his sincere love of good found their natural field; the country was poor, crushed under imposts, badly intersected by roads badly kept, inhabited by an ignorant populace, violently hostile to the recruitment of the militia.  He encouraged agriculture, distributed the talliages more equitably, amended the old roads and constructed new ones, abolished forced labor (corvees), provided for the wants of the poor and wretched during the dearth of 1770 and 1771, and declined, successively, the superintendentship of Rouen, of Lyons, and of Bordeaux, in order that he might be able to complete the useful tasks he had begun at Limoges.  It was in that district, which had become dear to him, that he was sought out by the kindly remembrance of Abbe de Wry, his boyhood’s friend, who was intimate with Madame de Maurepas.  Scarcely had he been installed in the department of marine and begun to conceive vast plans, when the late ministers of Louis XV. succumbed at last beneath the popular hatred; in the place of Abbe Terray, M. Turgot became comptroller-general.

The old parliamentarians were triumphant; at the same time as Abbe Terray, Chancellor Maupeou was disgraced, and the judicial system he had founded fell with him.  Unpopular from the first, the Maupeou Parliament had remained in the nation’s eyes the image of absolute power corrupted and corrupting.  The suit between Beaumarchais and Councillor Goezman had contributed to decry it, thanks to the uproar the able pamphleteer had managed to cause; the families of the former magistrates were powerful, numerous, esteemed, and they put pressure upon public opinion; M. de Maurepas determined to retract the last absolutist attempt of Louis XV.’s reign; his first care was to send and demand of Chancellor Maupeou the surrender of the seals.  “I know what you have come to tell me,” said the latter to the Duke of La Vrilliere, who was usually charged with this painful mission, “but I am and shall continue to be chancellor of France,” and he kept his seat whilst addressing the minister, in accordance with his official privilege.  He handed to the duke the casket of seals, which the latter was to take straight to M. de Miromesnil.  “I had gained the king a great cause,” said Maupeou; “he is pleased to reopen a question which was decided; as to that he is master.”  Imperturbable and haughty as ever, he retired to his estate at Thuit, near the Andelys, where he drew up a justificatory memorandum of his ministry, which he had put into the king’s hands, without ever attempting to enter the court or Paris again; he died in the country, at the outset of the revolutionary