It was paying M. Necker a great compliment to set his financial talents on a par with the grand views, noble schemes, and absolute disinterestedness of M. Turgot.  Nevertheless, when the latter fell, public opinion had become, if not hostile, at any rate indifferent to him; it still remained faithful to M. Necker.  Withdrawing his pretensions to admission into the council, the director-general of finance was very urgent to obtain other marks of the royal confidence, necessary, he said, to keep up the authority of his administration.  M. de Maurepas had no longer the pretext of religion, but he hit upon others which wounded M. Necker deeply; the latter wrote to the king on a small sheet of common paper, without heading or separate line, and as if he were suddenly resuming all the forms of republicanism:  “The conversation I have had with M. de Maurepas permits me to no longer defer placing my resignation in the king’s hands.  I feel my heart quite lacerated by it, and I dare to hope that his Majesty will deign to. preserve some remembrance of five years’ successful but painful toil, and especially of the boundless zeal with which I devoted myself to his service.” [May 19, 1783.]

M. Necker had been treated less harshly than M. Turgot.  The king accepted his resignation without having provoked it.  The queen made some efforts to retain him, but M. Necker remained inflexible.  “Reserved as he was,” says his daughter, “he had a proud disposition, a sensitive spirit; he was a man of energy in his whole style of sentiments.”  The fallen minister retired to his country-house at St. Ouen.

He was accompanied thither by the respect and regret of the public, and the most touching proofs of their esteem.  “You would have said, to see the universal astonishment, that never was news so unexpected as that of M. Necker’s resignation,” writes Grimm in his Correspondance litteraire; “consternation was depicted on every face; those who felt otherwise were in a very small minority; they would have blushed to show it.  The walks, the cafes, all the public thoroughfares were full of people, but an extraordinary silence prevailed.  People looked at one another, and mournfully wrung one another’s hands, as if in the presence, I would say, of a public calamity, were it not that these first moments of distress resembled rather the grief of a disconsolate family which has just lost the object and the mainstay of its hopes.  The same evening they gave, at the Comedie-Francaise, a performance of the Partie de Chasse de Henri IV.  I have often seen at the play in Paris allusions to passing events caught up with great cleverness, but I never saw any which were so with such palpable and general an interest.  Every piece of applause, when there was anything concerning Sully, seemed, so to speak, to bear a special character, a shade appropriate to the sentiment the audience felt; it was by turns that of sorrow and sadness, of gratitude and respect;