g to face the repugnance and the passions of the two
privileged orders on which it was a question of imposing painful
sacrifices, however legitimate and indispensable they might be.

M. Malouet and those who thought with him, more in number than anybody
could tell, demanded instructions as to the elections in the bailiwicks.
"Can you have allowed this great crisis to come on without any
preparations for defence, without any combination?" they said to the
ministers. "You have, through the police, the superintendents, the
king's proctors in the tribunals, means of knowing men and choosing them,
or, at any rate, of directing choice; these means, have you employed
them?"

M. Necker could not give his instructions; he had not yet made up his
mind on the question which was engaging everybody's thoughts; he
hesitated to advise the king to consent to the doubling of the third.
"He had a timid pride which was based on his means, on his celebrity, and
which made him incessantly afraid of compromising himself with public
opinion, which he could no longer manage to control when he found himself
opposed by it," said Malouet. Marmontel, who knew the minister well,
added, "That solitary mind, abstracted, self-concentrated, naturally
enthusiastic, had little communication with men in general, and few men
were tempted to have communication with him; he knew them only by
glimpses too isolated or too vague, and hence his illusions as to the
character of the people at whose mercy he was placing the state and the
king."

M. Necker's illusions as to himself never disappeared; he had a vague
presentiment of the weakening of his influence over public opinion, and
he was pained thereat. He resolved at last to follow it. "It is a great
mistake," he wrote at a later period in his _Memoires,_ "to pretend to
struggle, with only antiquated notions on your side, against all the
vigor of the principles of natural justice, when that justice renews its
impulse and finds itself seconded by the natural desire of a nation. The
great test of ability in affairs is to obtain the merit of the sacrifice
before the moment when that same sacrifice will appear a matter of
necessity."

The favorable moment, which M. Necker still thought of seizing, had
already slipped by him. The royal resolution proclaimed under this
strange title, _Result of the King's Council held on the 27th of
December, 1788,_ caused neither great astonishment nor lively
satisfactio