Whereupon a new expedient once more astonishes the world, unheard of these hundred and sixty years—­Convocation of the Notables.  A round gross of notables, meeting in February, 1787; all privileged persons.  A deficit so enormous!  Mismanagement, profusion, is too clear; peculation itself is hinted at.  Calonne flies, storm-driven, over the horizon.  To whom succeeds Lomenie-Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse—­adopting Calonne’s plans, as Calonne had proposed to adopt Turgot’s; and the notables are, as it were, organed out in kind of choral anthem of thanks, praises, promises.

Lomenie issues conciliatory edicts, fiscal edicts.  But if the Parlement of Paris refuse to register them?  As it does, entering complaints instead.  Lomenie launches his thunderbolt, six score lettres de cachet; the Parlement is trundled off to Troyes, in Champagne, for a month.  Yet two months later, when a royal session is held, to have edicts registered, there is no registering.  Orleans, “Equality” that is to be, has made the protest, and cut its moorings.

The provincial parlements, moreover, back up the Paris Parlement with its demand for a States-General.  Lomenie hatches a cockatrice egg; but it is broken in premature manner; the plot discovered and denounced.  Nevertheless, the Parlement is dispersed by D’Agoust with Gardes Francaises and Gardes Suisses.  Still, however, will none of the provincial parlements register.

Deputations coming from Brittany meet to take counsel, being refused audience; become the Breton Club, first germ of the Jacobins’ Society.  Lomenie at last announces that the States-General shall meet in the May of next year (1789).  For the holding of which, since there is no known plan, “thinkers are invited” to furnish one.

II.—–­The States-General

Wherewith Lomenie departs; flimsier mortal was seldom fated to do as weighty a mischief.  The archbishop is thrown out, and M. Necker is recalled.  States-General will meet, if not in January, at least in May.  But how to form it?  On the model of the last States-General in 1614, says the Parlement, which means that the Tiers Etat will be of no account, if the noblesse and the clergy agree.  Wherewith terminates the popularity of the Parlement.  As for the “thinkers,” it is a sheer snowing of pamphlets.  And Abbe Sieyes has come to Paris to ask three questions, and answer them:  What is the Third Estate?  All.  What has it hitherto been in our form of government?  Nothing.  What does it want?  To become something.

The grand questions are:  Shall the States-General sit and vote in three separate bodies, or in one body, wherein the Tiers Etat shall have double representation?  The notables are again summoned to decide, but vanish without decision.  With those questions still unsettled, the election begins.  And presently the national deputies are in Paris.  Also there is a sputter; drudgery and rascality rising in Saint-Antoine, finally repressed by Gardes Suisses and grapeshot.