ishop has resigned,
and that she has just summoned Necker to come to her the next morning.
Though she felt that she had done what was both right and indispensable,
she was not without misgivings. "If," she writes, in a strain of anxious
despondency very foreign to her usual tone, and which shows how deeply she
felt the importance of the crisis, and of every step that might be taken--
"if he will but undertake the task, it is the best thing that can be done;
but I tremble (excuse my weakness) at the fact that it is I who have
brought him back. It is my fate to bring misfortune, and, if infernal
machinations should cause him once more to fail, or if he should lower the
authority of the king, they will hate me still more."

In one point of view she need not have trembled at being known to have
caused Necker's re-appointment, since it is plain that no other nomination
was possible. Vergennes had died a few months before, and the whole
kingdom did not supply a single statesman of reputation except Necker. Nor
could any choice have for the moment been more universally popular. The
citizens illuminated Paris; the mob burned the archbishop in effigy; and
the leading merchants and bankers showed their approval in a far more
practical way. The funds rose; loans to any amount were freely offered to
the Treasury; the national credit revived; as if the solvency or
insolvency of the nation depended on a single man, and him a foreigner.

Yet, if regarded in any point of view except that of a financier, he was
extremely unfit to be the minister at such a crisis; and the queen's
acuteness had, in the extract from her letter which has been, quoted
above, correctly pointed out the danger to be apprehended, namely, that he
might lower the authority of the king.[7] It was, in fact, to his uniform
and persistent degradation of the king's authority that the greater part,
if not the whole, of the evils which ensued may be clearly traced, and the
cause that led him to adopt this fatal system was thoroughly visible to
one gifted with such intuitive penetration into character as Marie
Antoinette. For he had two great defects or weaknesses; an overweening
vanity, which, as it is valued applause above every thing, led him to
regard the popularity which they might win for him as the natural motive
and the surest test of his actions; and an abstract belief in human
perfection and in the submission of all classes to strict reason, which
could only pro