ble in order was more fruitfully spent than
the busiest hours of most men.

[Footnote 9: _OEuv. de Turgot_, ii. 783. (Edition of Messrs. Eugene
Daire and H. Dussard, published in the _Collection des Principaux
Economistes_, published by Guillaumin, 1844.)]

[Footnote 10: _Memoires_, i. 16.]

We know the books which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour.
Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa,
Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and
enlarged what they read.[11] One of the disputants, certainly not the
least amiable, has painted his own part in these discussions: 'I was
violent in discussion,' says the good Morellet, as he was pleasantly
called, 'but without my antagonist being able to reproach me with a
single insult; and sometimes I used to spit blood, after a debate in
which I had not allowed a single personality to escape me.'[12]

[Footnote 11: _Ib._ i. 20.]

[Footnote 12: _Ib._ i. 19.]

Another member of the circle was Lomenie de Brienne, who, in long years
after, was chief minister of France for a narrow space through the
momentous winter of 1787 and the spring of the next year, filling the
gap between Calonne and Necker in a desperate and fatal manner.
Lomenie's ambition dated from his youth; and it was always personal and
mean. While Turgot, his friend, was earnestly meditating on the
destinies of the race and the conditions of their development, Lomenie
was dreaming only of the restoration of his ancestral chateau of
Brienne. Though quite without means, he planned this in his visions on a
scale of extreme costliness and magnificence. The dreams fell true.
Money came to the family, and the chateau was built exactly as he had
projected it, at a cost of two million francs.[13] His career was
splendid. He was clever, industrious, and persevering after his fashion,
astute, lively, pretentious, a person ever by well-planned hints leading
you to suppose his unrevealed profundity to be bottomless; in a word, in
all respects an impostor.[14] He espoused that richly dowered bride the
Church, rose to be Archbishop of Toulouse, and would have risen to be
Archbishop of Paris, but for the King's over-scrupulous conviction that
'an Archbishop of Paris must at least believe in God.' He became an
immense favourite with Marie Antoinette and the court, was made Minister
'like Richelieu and Mazarin,' and after having postured and played
tricks in face of the b