rom the Isles of
St. Marguerite even unto this place, has made everybody laugh at the
ostentation with which he shook his fetters to make them clank."

The troubles amongst the populace had subsided, but agitation amongst the
thoughtful went on increasing, and the embarrassments of M. Necker
increased with the agitation amongst the thoughtful. Naturally a
stranger to politics properly so called, constantly engaged as he was in
finance or administration, the minister's constitutional ideas were
borrowed from England; he himself saw how inapplicable they were to the
situation of France. "I was never called upon," he says in his
_Memoirs,_ "to examine closely into what I could make, at the time of my
return to office, of my profound and particular esteem for the government
of England, for, if at a very early period my reflections and my
conversation could not but show symptoms of the opinions I held, at a
very early period, also, I perceived how averse the king was from
anything that might resemble the political practices and institutions of
England." "M. Necker," says M. Malouet, "showed rare sagacity in espying
in the greatest detail and on the furthest horizon the defects, the
inconveniences of every measure, and it was this faculty of extending his
observations to infinity which made him so often undecided." What with
these doubts existing in his own mind, and what with the antagonistic
efforts of parties as well as individual wills, the minister conceived
the hope of releasing himself from the crushing burden of his personal
responsibility; he convoked for the second time the Assembly of notables.

Impotent as it was in 1787, this assembly was sure to be and was even
more so in 1788. Mirabeau had said with audacious intuition: "It is no
longer a question of what has been, but of what has to be." The notables
clung to the past like shipwrecked mariners who find themselves invaded
by raging waters. Meeting on the 6th of November at Versailles, they
opposed in mass the doubling of the third (estate); the committee
presided over by Monsieur, the king's brother, alone voted for the double
representation, and that by a majority of only one-voice. The Assembly
likewise refused to take into account the population of the
circumscriptions (outlying districts) in fixing the number of its
representatives; the seneschalty of Poitiers, which numbered seven
hundred thousand inhabitants, was not to have more deputies than the