And now, in stately royal apartments, as Pictures of that time still represent them, our hundred and forty-four Notables sit organised; ready to hear and consider.  Controller Calonne is dreadfully behindhand with his speeches, his preparatives; however, the man’s ‘facility of work’ is known to us.  For freshness of style, lucidity, ingenuity, largeness of view, that opening Harangue of his was unsurpassable:—­had not the subject-matter been so appalling.  A Deficit, concerning which accounts vary, and the Controller’s own account is not unquestioned; but which all accounts agree in representing as ‘enormous.’  This is the epitome of our Controller’s difficulties:  and then his means?  Mere Turgotism; for thither, it seems, we must come at last:  Provincial Assemblies; new Taxation; nay, strangest of all, new Land-tax, what he calls Subvention Territoriale, from which neither Privileged nor Unprivileged, Noblemen, Clergy, nor Parlementeers, shall be exempt!

Foolish enough!  These Privileged Classes have been used to tax; levying toll, tribute and custom, at all hands, while a penny was left:  but to be themselves taxed?  Of such Privileged persons, meanwhile, do these Notables, all but the merest fraction, consist.  Headlong Calonne had given no heed to the ‘composition,’ or judicious packing of them; but chosen such Notables as were really notable; trusting for the issue to off-hand ingenuity, good fortune, and eloquence that never yet failed.  Headlong Controller-General!  Eloquence can do much, but not all.  Orpheus, with eloquence grown rhythmic, musical (what we call Poetry), drew iron tears from the cheek of Pluto:  but by what witchery of rhyme or prose wilt thou from the pocket of Plutus draw gold?

Accordingly, the storm that now rose and began to whistle round Calonne, first in these Seven Bureaus, and then on the outside of them, awakened by them, spreading wider and wider over all France, threatens to become unappeasable.  A Deficit so enormous!  Mismanagement, profusion is too clear.  Peculation itself is hinted at; nay, Lafayette and others go so far as to speak it out, with attempts at proof.  The blame of his Deficit our brave Calonne, as was natural, had endeavoured to shift from himself on his predecessors; not excepting even Necker.  But now Necker vehemently denies; whereupon an ‘angry Correspondence,’ which also finds its way into print.

In the Oeil-de-Boeuf, and her Majesty’s private Apartments, an eloquent Controller, with his “Madame, if it is but difficult,” had been persuasive:  but, alas, the cause is now carried elsewhither.  Behold him, one of these sad days, in Monsieur’s Bureau; to which all the other Bureaus have sent deputies.  He is standing at bay:  alone; exposed to an incessant fire of questions, interpellations, objurgations, from those ‘hundred and thirty-seven’ pieces of logic-ordnance,—­what we may well call bouches a feu, fire-mouths literally!  Never, according to Besenval, or hardly ever, had such display of intellect,