lor (_aux enquetes_) eagerly. "To
Marly! To Marly!" at once repeated the whole chamber. The old
councillors themselves murmured between their teeth, "To Marly!"
Fourteen carriages conveyed to Marly fifty magistrates, headed by the
presidents. The king refused to receive them; in vain the premier
president insisted upon it, to Cardinal Fleury; the monarch and his
Parliament remained equally obstinate. "What a sad position!" exclaimed
Abbe Pernelle, "not to be able to fulfil one's duties without falling
into the crime of disobedience! We speak, and we are forbidden a word;
we deliberate, and we are threatened. What remains for us, then, in this
deplorable position, but to represent to the king the impossibility of
existing under form of Parliament, without having permission to speak;
the impossibility, by consequence, of continuing our functions?" Abbe
Pernelle was carried off in the night, and confined in the abbey of
Corbigny, in Nivernais, of which he was titular head. Other councillors
were arrested; a hundred and fifty magistrates immediately gave in their
resignation. Rising in the middle of the assembly, they went out two and
two, dressed in their long scarlet robes, and threaded the crowd in
silence. There was a shout as they went, "There go true Romans, and
fathers of their country!" "All those who saw this procession," says
the advocate Barbier, "declare that it was something august and
overpowering." The government did not accept the resignations; the
struggle continued. A hundred and thirty-nine members received letters
under the king's seal (_lettres de cachet_), exiling them to the four
quarters of France. The Grand Chamber had been spared; the old
councillors, alone remaining, enregistered purely and simply the
declarations of the keeper of the seals. Once more the Parliament was
subdued; it had testified its complete political impotence. The iron
hand of Richelieu, the perfect address of Mazarin, were no longer
necessary to silence it; the prudent moderation, the reserved frigidity,
of Cardinal Fleury had sufficed for the purpose. "The minister,
victorious over the Parliament, had become the arbiter of Europe," said
Frederick II., in his _History of my Time_. The standard of
intelligences and of wills had everywhere sunk down to the level of the
government of France. Unhappily, the day was coming when the thrones of
Europe were about to be occupied by stronger and more expanded minds,
wh