glances and impulses; clear, and even noble; but all too superficial, vehement-shallow, for that work!  To govern France were such a problem; and now it has grown well-nigh too hard to govern even the Oeil-de-Boeuf.  For if a distressed People has its cry, so likewise, and more audibly, has a bereaved Court.  To the Oeil-de-Boeuf it remains inconceivable how, in a France of such resources, the Horn of Plenty should run dry:  did it not use to flow?  Nevertheless Necker, with his revenue of parsimony, has ‘suppressed above six hundred places,’ before the Courtiers could oust him; parsimonious finance-pedant as he was.  Again, a military pedant, Saint-Germain, with his Prussian manoeuvres; with his Prussian notions, as if merit and not coat-of-arms should be the rule of promotion, has disaffected military men; the Mousquetaires, with much else are suppressed:  for he too was one of your suppressors; and unsettling and oversetting, did mere mischief—­to the Oeil-de-Boeuf.  Complaints abound; scarcity, anxiety:  it is a changed Oeil-de-Boeuf.  Besenval says, already in these years (1781) there was such a melancholy (such a tristesse) about Court, compared with former days, as made it quite dispiriting to look upon.

No wonder that the Oeil-de-Boeuf feels melancholy, when you are suppressing its places!  Not a place can be suppressed, but some purse is the lighter for it; and more than one heart the heavier; for did it not employ the working-classes too,—­manufacturers, male and female, of laces, essences; of Pleasure generally, whosoever could manufacture Pleasure?  Miserable economies; never felt over Twenty-five Millions!  So, however, it goes on:  and is not yet ended.  Few years more and the Wolf-hounds shall fall suppressed, the Bear-hounds, the Falconry; places shall fall, thick as autumnal leaves.  Duke de Polignac demonstrates, to the complete silencing of ministerial logic, that his place cannot be abolished; then gallantly, turning to the Queen, surrenders it, since her Majesty so wishes.  Less chivalrous was Duke de Coigny, and yet not luckier:  “We got into a real quarrel, Coigny and I,” said King Louis; “but if he had even struck me, I could not have blamed him.” (Besenval, iii. 255-58.) In regard to such matters there can be but one opinion.  Baron Besenval, with that frankness of speech which stamps the independent man, plainly assures her Majesty that it is frightful (affreux); “you go to bed, and are not sure but you shall rise impoverished on the morrow:  one might as well be in Turkey.”  It is indeed a dog’s life.

How singular this perpetual distress of the royal treasury!  And yet it is a thing not more incredible than undeniable.  A thing mournfully true:  the stumbling-block on which all Ministers successively stumble, and fall.  Be it ‘want of fiscal genius,’ or some far other want, there is the palpablest discrepancy between Revenue and Expenditure; a Deficit of the Revenue:  you must ‘choke (combler) the Deficit,’ or else it will swallow