as the use of the preparatory question or
preliminary torture applied to defendants. The regimen of prisons was at
the same time ameliorated, the dark dungeons of old times restored to
daylight the wretches who were still confined in them.

So many useful and beneficent measures, in harmony with the king's honest
and generous desires, but opposed to the prejudices still potent in many
minds and against the interests of many people, kept up about M. Necker,
for all the esteem and confidence of the general public, powerful
hatreds, ably served: his admission to the council was decidedly refused.
"You may be admitted," said M. de Maurepas with his, usual malice, "if
you please to abjure the errors of Calvin." M. Necker did not deign to
reply. "You who, being quite certain that I would not consent, proposed
to me a change of religion in order to smooth away the obstacles you put
in my path," says M. Necker in his Memoires, "what would you not have
thought me worthy of after such baseness? It was rather in respect of
the vast finance-administration that this scruple should have been
raised. Up to the moment when it was intrusted to me, it was uncertain
whether I was worth an exception to the general rules. What new
obligation could be imposed upon him who held the post before promising?"

"If I was passionately attached to the place I occupied," says M: Necker
again, "it is on grounds for which I have no reason to blush. I
considered that the administrator of finance, who is responsible on his
honor for ways and means, ought, for the welfare of the state and for his
own reputation, to be invited, especially after several years' ministry,
to the deliberations touching peace and war, and I looked upon it as very
important that he should be able to join his reflections to those of the
king's other servants: A place in the council may, as a general rule, be
a matter in which self-love is interested; but I am going to say a proud
thing: when one has cherished another passion, when one has sought praise
and glory, when one has followed after those triumphs which belong to
one's self alone, one regards rather coolly such functions as are shared
with others."

"Your Majesty saw that M. Necker, in his dangerous proposal, was sticking
to his place with a tenacity which lacks neither reason nor method," said
M. de Vergennes in a secret Note addressed to the king; "he aspires to
new favors, calculated from their nature to scare