of your other ministers, Sir, are nearly always reparable, and their places are easily filled.  But the choice of him to whom is committed the happiness of twenty-four millions of souls and the duty of making your authority cherished is of frightful importance.  With M. Necker, Sir, even in peace, the imposts would be accepted, whatever they might be, without a murmur.  The conviction would be that inevitable necessity had laid down the laws for them, and that a wise use of them would justify them, . . . whereas, if your Majesty puts to hazard an administration on which all the rest depend, it is to be feared that the difficulties will be multiplied with the selections you will be obliged to have recourse to; you will find one day destroy what another set up, and at last there will arrive one when no way will be seen of serving the state but by failing to keep all your Majesty’s engagements, and thereby putting an end to all the confidence which the commencement of your reign inspired.”

The honest zeal of Marshal de Castries for the welfare of the state had inspired him with prophetic views; but royal weakness exhibits sometimes unexpected doggedness.  “As regards M. Necker,” answered Louis XVI., “I will tell you frankly that after the manner in which I treated him and that in which he left me, I couldn’t think of employing him at all.”  After some court-intrigues which brought forward names that were not in good odor, that of Foulon, late superintendent of the forces, and of the Archbishop of Toulouse, Lomenie de Brienne, the king sent for M. de Calonne, superintendent of Lille, and intrusted him with the post of comptroller-general.

It was court-influence that carried the day, and, in the court, that of the queen, prompted by her favorite, Madame de Polignac.  Tenderly attached to his wife, who had at last given him a son, Louis XVI., delivered from the predominant influence of M. de Maurepas, was yielding, almost unconsciously, to a new power.  Marie Antoinette, who had long held aloof from politics, henceforth changed her part; at the instigation of the friends whom she honored with a perhaps excessive intimacy, she began to take an important share in affairs, a share which was often exaggerated by public opinion, more and more hard upon her every day.

Received on her arrival in France with some mistrust, of which she had managed to get the better amongst the public, having been loved and admired as long as she was dauphiness, the young queen, after her long period of constraint in the royal family, had soon profited by her freedom; she had a horror of etiquette, to which the court of Austria had not made her accustomed; she gladly escaped from the grand palaces of Louis XIV., where the traditions of his reign seemed still to exercise a secret influence, in order to seek at her little manor-house of Trianon new amusements and rustic pleasures, innocent and simple, and attended with no other inconvenience but the air of cliquedom and almost of mystery in which the queen’s guests enveloped themselves.  Public rumor soon reached the ears of Maria Theresa.  She, tenderly concerned for her daughter’s happiness and conduct, wrote to her on this subject:—­