e and forging my signature, has just been fully
acquitted. But,' she added vehemently, 'as a Frenchwoman, accept my
condolence. A people is very unfortunate to have for its supreme
tribunal a lot of men who consult nothing but their passions, and of whom
some are capable of bribery and others of an audacity which they have
always displayed towards authority, and of which they have just given a
striking example against those who are clothed therewith.' The king
entered at this moment. 'You find the queen in great affliction,' he
said to me: 'she has great reason to be. But what then! They would not
see in this business anything save a prince of the church and the prince
of Rohan, whereas it is only the case of a man in want of money and a
mere dodge for raising the wind, wherein the cardinal has been swindled
in his turn. Nothing can be easier to understand, and it needs no
Alexander to cut this Gordian knot.'"

Guilty in the king's eyes, a dupe according to the judgment of history,
Cardinal Rohan was exiled to his abbey of Chaise-Dieu, less to be pitied
than the unhappy queen abruptly wrenched from the sweet dreams of a
romantic friendship and confidence, as well as from the nascent joys of
maternal happiness, to find herself henceforth confronting a deluded
people and an ever increasing hostility which was destined to unjustly
persecute her even to the block.

M. de Calonne had taken little part in the excitement which the trial
of Cardinal Rohan caused in court and city he was absorbed by the
incessantly recurring difficulties presented by the condition of the
treasury; speculation had extended to all classes of society; loans
succeeded loans, everywhere there were formed financial companies,
without any resources to speak of, speculating on credit. Parliament
began to be alarmed, and enregistered no more credits save with
repugnance. Just as he was setting out on a trip to Normandy, which
afforded him one of the last happy days of his life and as it were a
dying flicker of his past popularity, the king scratched out on the
registers of the Parliament the restrictions introduced by the court into
the new loan of eighty millions presented by M. de Calonne. "I wish it
to be known that I am satisfied with my comptroller-general," said Louis
XVI. with that easy confidence which he did not always place wisely.
When he returned from Cherbourg, at the end of June, 1786, M. de Calonne
had at last arrived at the ext