severe economy; the king’s household was diminished, twenty-five thousand men were struck off the strength of the army, exemption from talliage for six years was promised to all such discharged soldiers as should restore a deserted house, and should put into cultivation the fields lying waste.  At the same time something was being taken off the crushing weight of the taxes, and the state was assuming the charge of recovering them directly, without any regard for the real or supposed advances of the receivers-general; their accounts were submitted to the revision of the brothers Paris, sons of an innkeeper in the Dauphinese Alps, who had made fortunes by military contracts, and were all four reputed to be very able in matters of finance.  They were likewise commissioned to revise the bills circulating in the name of the state, in other words, to suppress a great number without re-imbursement to the holder, a sort of bankruptcy in disguise, which did not help to raise the public credit.  At the same time also a chamber of justice, instituted for that purpose, was prosecuting the tax-farmers (traitants), as Louis XIV. had done at the commencement of his reign, during the suit against Fouquet.  All were obliged to account for their acquisitions and the state of their fortunes; the notaries were compelled to bring their books before the court.  Several tax-farmers (traitants) killed themselves to escape the violence and severity of the procedure.  The Parliament, anything but favorable to the speculators, but still less disposed to suffer its judicial privileges to be encroached upon, found fault with the degrees of the Chamber.  The Regent’s friends were eager to profit by the reaction which was manifesting itself in the public mind; partly from compassion, partly from shameful cupidity, all the courtiers set themselves to work to obtain grace for the prosecuted financiers.  The finest ladies sold their protection with brazen faces; the Regent, who had sworn to show no favor to anybody, yielded to the solicitations of his friends, to the great disgust of M. Rouille-Ducoudray, member of the council of finance, who directed the operations of the Chamber of Justice with the same stern frankness which had made him not long before say to a body of tax-farmers (traitants) who wanted to put at his disposal a certain number of shares in their enterprise, “And suppose I were to go shares with you, how could I have you hanged, in case you were rogues?” Nobody was really hanged, although torture and the penalty of death had been set down in the list of punishments to which the guilty were liable; out of four thousand five hundred amenable cases, nearly three thousand had been exempted from the tax.  “The corruption is so wide-spread,” says the preamble to the edict of March, 1727, which suppressed the Chamber of Justice, “that nearly all conditions have been infected by it in such sort that the most righteous severities could not be employed