t you see that a nation does not feel the
extremity of misery till its governors have lost all shame, because that
is the instant when the subjects throw off all respect and awake
convulsively out of their lethargy.

The Swiss seemed, as it were, crushed under the weight of their chains,
when three of their powerful cantons revolted and formed themselves into
a league. The Dutch thought of nothing but an entire subjection to the
tyrant Duke of Alva, when the Prince of Orange, by the peculiar destiny
of great geniuses, who see further into the future than all the world
besides, conceived a plan and restored their liberty. The reason of all
this is plain: that which causes a supineness in suffering States is the
duration of the evil, which inclines the sufferers to believe it will
never have an end; as soon as they have hopes of getting out of it, which
never fails when the evil has arrived at a certain pitch, they are so
surprised, so glad, and so transported, that they run all of a sudden
into the other extreme, and are so far from thinking revolutions
impossible that they suppose them easy, and such a disposition alone is
sometimes able to bring them about; witness the late revolution in
France. Who could have imagined, three months before the critical period
of our disorders, that such a revolution could have happened in a kingdom
where all the branches of the royal family were strictly united, where
the Court was a slave to the Prime Minister, where the capital city and
all the provinces were in subjection to him, where the armies were
victorious, and where the corporations and societies seemed to have no
power?--whoever, I say, had said this would have been thought a madman,
not only in the judgment of the vulgar, but in the opinion of a D'Estrees
or a Senneterre.

In August, 1647, there was a mighty clamour against the tariff edict
imposing a general tax upon all provisions that came into Paris, which
the people were resolved to bear no longer. But the gentlemen of the
Council being determined to support it, the Queen consulted the members
deputed from Parliament, when Cardinal Mazarin, a mere ignoramus in these
affairs, said he wondered that so considerable a body as they were should
mind such trifles,--an expression truly worthy of Mazarin. However, the
Council at length imagining the Parliament would do it, thought fit to
suppress the tariff themselves by a declaration, in order to save the
King's credit.