, instituted
for that purpose, was prosecuting the tax-farmers (_traitants_), as Louis
XIV. had done at the commencement of his reign, during the suit against
Fouquet. All were obliged to account for their acquisitions and the
state of their fortunes; the notaries were compelled to bring their books
before the court. Several tax-farmers (_traitants_) killed themselves to
escape the violence and severity of the procedure. The Parliament,
anything but favorable to the speculators, but still less disposed to
suffer its judicial privileges to be encroached upon, found fault with
the degrees of the Chamber. The Regent's friends were eager to profit by
the reaction which was manifesting itself in the public mind; partly from
compassion, partly from shameful cupidity, all the courtiers set
themselves to work to obtain grace for the prosecuted financiers. The
finest ladies sold their protection with brazen faces; the Regent, who
had sworn to show no favor to anybody, yielded to the solicitations of
his friends, to the great disgust of M. Rouille-Ducoudray, member of the
council of finance, who directed the operations of the Chamber of Justice
with the same stern frankness which had made him not long before say to a
body of tax-farmers (_traitants_) who wanted to put at his disposal a
certain number of shares in their enterprise, "And suppose I were to go
shares with you, how could I have you hanged, in case you were rogues?"
Nobody was really hanged, although torture and the penalty of death had
been set down in the list of punishments to which the guilty were liable;
out of four thousand five hundred amenable cases, nearly three thousand
had been exempted from the tax. "The corruption is so wide-spread," says
the preamble to the edict of March, 1727, which suppressed the Chamber of
Justice, "that nearly all conditions have been infected by it in such
sort that the most righteous severities could not be employed to punish
so great a number of culprits without causing a dangerous interruption to
commerce, and a kind of general shock in the system of the state." The
resources derived from the punishment of the tax-farmers (_traitants_),
as well as from the revision of the state's debts, thus remaining very
much below expectation, the deficit went on continually increasing. In
order to re-establish the finances, the Duke of Noailles demanded fifteen
years' impracticable economy, as chimerical as the increment of the
revenues