she had not yet criticised the
weakness and insufficiency of the king her husband; she did not as yet
write: "The personage over me is not fit, and as for me, whatever may be
said and come what may, I am never anything but secondary, and, in spite
of the confidence reposed by the first, he often makes me feel it." She
was troubled, nevertheless, and others more sagacious were more so than
she. "When I arrived at Paris, where I had not been for more than three
years," says M. Malouet, for a long while the king's commissioner in the
colonies, and latterly superintendent of Toulon, "observing the heat of
political discussions as well as of the pamphlets in circulation,
M. d'Entraigues' work and Abbe Sieyes', the troubles in Brittany and
those in Dauphiny, my illusions vanished; I was seized with all the
terrors confided to me by Abbe Raynal on my way to Marseilles. I found
M. Necker beginning to be afraid, but still flattering himself that he
would have means of continuing, directing, and bringing everything
right." The Parliament was still more affrighted than M. Malouet and M.
Necker. Summoned, on the 28th of September, to enregister the king's
proclamation relative to the convocation of the States-general, it added
this clause: "According to the forms observed in 1614." It was a reply
in the negative on the part of the magistracy to all the new aspirations
to the vote by polling (_vote par tete_) as well as to the doubling of
the third already gained in principle amongst the provincial assemblies;
the popularity of the Parliament at once vanished. M. d'Espremesnil,
hardly returned from the Isles of St. Marguerite, and all puffed up with
his glory, found himself abandoned by those who had been loudest in
vaunting his patriotic zeal. An old councillor had but lately said to
him, when he was calling for the States-general with all his might,
"Providence will punish your fatal counsels by granting your wishes."
After the triumph of his return to Paris, amidst the desert which was
forming around the Parliament, "the martyr, the hero of liberty," as his
enthusiastic admirers had been wont to call him, had to realize that
instability of human affairs and that fragility of popularity to which he
had shut his eyes even in his prison, when Mirabeau, ever biting and
cynical, wrote to one of his friends

"Neighborhood will doubtless procure you a visit from that immense
D'Espremesnil, the sage commentator upon Mesmer, who, f