But now, while Ex-Controller Calonne flies storm-driven over the horizon, in this singular way, what has become of the Controllership?  It hangs vacant, one may say; extinct, like the Moon in her vacant interlunar cave.  Two preliminary shadows, poor M. Fourqueux, poor M. Villedeuil, do hold in quick succession some simulacrum of it, (Besenval, iii. 225.)—­as the new Moon will sometimes shine out with a dim preliminary old one in her arms.  Be patient, ye Notables!  An actual new Controller is certain, and even ready; were the indispensable manoeuvres but gone through.  Long-headed Lamoignon, with Home Secretary Breteuil, and Foreign Secretary Montmorin have exchanged looks; let these three once meet and speak.  Who is it that is strong in the Queen’s favour, and the Abbe de Vermond’s?  That is a man of great capacity?  Or at least that has struggled, these fifty years, to have it thought great; now, in the Clergy’s name, demanding to have Protestant death-penalties ‘put in execution;’ no flaunting it in the Oeil-de-Boeuf, as the gayest man-pleaser and woman-pleaser; gleaning even a good word from Philosophedom and your Voltaires and D’Alemberts?  With a party ready-made for him in the Notables?—­Lomenie de Brienne, Archbishop of Toulouse! answer all the three, with the clearest instantaneous concord; and rush off to propose him to the King; ’in such haste,’ says Besenval, ‘that M. de Lamoignon had to borrow a simarre,’ seemingly some kind of cloth apparatus necessary for that. (Ib. iii. 224.)

Lomenie-Brienne, who had all his life ’felt a kind of predestination for the highest offices,’ has now therefore obtained them.  He presides over the Finances; he shall have the title of Prime Minister itself, and the effort of his long life be realised.  Unhappy only that it took such talent and industry to gain the place; that to qualify for it hardly any talent or industry was left disposable!  Looking now into his inner man, what qualification he may have, Lomenie beholds, not without astonishment, next to nothing but vacuity and possibility.  Principles or methods, acquirement outward or inward (for his very body is wasted, by hard tear and wear) he finds none; not so much as a plan, even an unwise one.  Lucky, in these circumstances, that Calonne has had a plan!  Calonne’s plan was gathered from Turgot’s and Necker’s by compilation; shall become Lomenie’s by adoption.  Not in vain has Lomenie studied the working of the British Constitution; for he professes to have some Anglomania, of a sort.  Why, in that free country, does one Minister, driven out by Parliament, vanish from his King’s presence, and another enter, borne in by Parliament? (Montgaillard, Histoire de France, i. 410-17.) Surely not for mere change (which is ever wasteful); but that all men may have share of what is going; and so the strife of Freedom indefinitely prolong itself, and no harm be done.