should have the poltroonery to use any other language to you; nobody should leave you in ignorance that the unanimous wish of the nation is to obtain states-general or at the least states-provincial. . . .  Deign to consider, Sir, that on the day you grant this precious liberty to your people it may be said that a treaty has been concluded between king and nation against ministers and magistrates:  against the ministers, if there be any perverted enough to wish to conceal from you the truth; against the magistrates, if there ever be any ambitious enough to pretend to have the exclusive right of telling you it.”

Almost the whole ministry was in the hands of reformers; a sincere desire to do good impelled the king towards those who promised him the happiness of his people.  Marshal Muy had succumbed to a painful operation.  “Sir,” he had said to Louis XVI., before placing himself in the surgeon’s hands, “in a fortnight I shall be at your Majesty’s feet or with your august father.”  He had succumbed.  M. Turgot spoke to M. de Maurepas of the Duke of St. Germain.  “Propose him to the king,” said the minister, adding his favorite phrase “one can but try.”

In the case of government, trials are often a dangerous thing.  M. de St. Germain, born in the Jura in 1707, and entered first of all amongst the Jesuits, had afterwards devoted himself to the career of arms:  he had served the Elector Palatine, Maria Theresa, and the Elector of Bavaria; enrolled finally by Marshal Saxe, he had distinguished himself under his orders; as lieutenant-general during the Seven Years’ War, he had brought up his divisionn at Rosbach more quickly than his colleagues had theirs, he had fled less far than the others before the enemy; but his character was difficult, suspicious, exacting; he was always seeing everywhere plots concocted to ruin him.  “I am persecuted to the death,” he would say.  He entered the service of Denmark:  returning to France and in poverty, he lived in Alsace on the retired list; it was there that the king’s summons came to find him out.  In his solitude M. de St. Germain had conceived a thousand projects of reform; he wanted to apply them all at once.  He made no sort of case of the picked corps and suppressed the majority of them, thus irritating, likewise, all the privileged.  “M. de St. Germain,” wrote Frederick II. to Voltaire, “had great and noble plans very advantageous for your Welches; but everybody thwarted him, because the reforms he proposed would have entailed a strictness which was repugnant to them on ten thousand sluggards, well frogged, well laced.”  The enthusiasm which had been excited by the new minister of war had disappeared from amongst the officers; he lost the hearts of the soldiers by wanting to establish in the army the corporal punishments in use amongst the German armies in which he had served.  The feeling was so strong, that the attempt was abandoned.  “In the matter of sabres,” said a grenadier, “I like only the edge.”  Violent and weak both together, in spite of his real merit and his genuine worth, often giving up wise resolutions out of sheer embarrassment, he nearly always failed in what he undertook; the outcries against the reformers were increased thereby; the faults of M. de St. Germain were put down to M. Turgot.