ents of his successor, who
questioned the truthfulness of the Report, addressed explanatory notes to
the several committees of the Assembly. He had already, in 1784,
published an important work in explanation and support of his financial
system; the success of the book had been immense; in spite of the
prohibition issued, at first, against the sale, but soon tacitly
withdrawn, the three volumes had sold, it was said, to the extent of
eighty thousand copies. In 1787, the late director-general asked leave
to appear before the Assembly of notables to refute the statements of M.
de Calonne; permission was refused. "I am satisfied with your services,"
the king sent word to him, "and I command you to keep silence."
A pamphlet, without any title, was however sent to the notables. "I
served the king for five years," said M. Necker, "with a zeal which knew
no limits the duties I had taken upon myself were the only object of my
solicitude. The interests of the state had become my passion and
occupied all my faculties of heart and mind. Forced to retire through a
combination of singular circumstances, I devoted my powers to the
composition of a laborious work, the utility of which appears, to me to
have been recognized. I heard it said that a portion of those ideas
about administration which had been so dear to me formed the basis of the
projects which were to be submitted to the Assembly of notables. I
rendered homage to the beneficent views of his Majesty. Content with the
contributions I had offered to the common weal, I was living happily and
in peace, when all at once I found myself attacked or rather assailed in
the most unjust and the strangest manner. M. de Calonne, finding it
advisable to trace to a very remote period the causes of the present
condition of the finances, was not afraid, in pursuance of this end,
to have recourse to means with which he will, probably, sooner or later
reproach himself; he declared in a speech, now circulated throughout
Europe, that the Report to his Majesty, in 1781, was so extraordinarily
erroneous, that, instead of the surplus published in that Report, there
was, at that very time, an enormous deficit."

At the moment when M. Necker was publishing, as regarded the statements
of M. de Calonne, an able rectification which did not go to the bottom
of things any more than the Report had previously gone, the
comptroller-general was succumbing beneath his enemies' attacks and his
own e