, and on the mighty current which was bearing France
towards reform, whilst dragging her into the Revolution, King Louis XVI.,
honest and sincere, was still blindly seeking to clutch the helm which
was slipping from his feeble hands. Every day his efforts were becoming
weaker and more inconsistent, every day the pilot placed at the tiller
was less and less deserving of public confidence. From M. Turgot to M.
Necker, from Calonne to Lomenie de Brienne, the fall had been rapid and
deep. Amongst the two parties which unequally divided the nation,
between those who defended the past in its entirety, its abuses as well
as its grandeurs, and those who were marching on bewildered towards a
reform of which they did not foresee the scope, the struggle underwent
certain moments of stoppage and of abrupt reaction towards the old state
of things. In 1781, the day after M. Necker's fall, an ordinance of the
minister of war, published against the will of that minister himself, had
restored to the verified and qualified noblesse (who could show four
quarterings) the exclusive privilege of military grades. Without any
ordinance, the same regulation had been applied to the clergy. In 1787,
the Assembly of notables and its opposition to the king's projects
presented by M. de Calonne were the last triumph of the enthusiastic
partisans of the past. The privileged classes had still too much
influence to be attacked with success by M. de Calonne, who appeared to
be in himself an assemblage of all the abuses whereof he desired to be
the reformer. A plan so vast, however ably conceived, was sure to go to
pieces in the hands of a man who did not enjoy public esteem and
confidence; but the triumph of the notables in their own cause was a
fresh warning to the people that they would have to defend theirs with
more vigor." [_Memoires de Malouet,_ t. i. p. 253]. We have seen how
monarchy, in concert with the nation, fought feudality, to reign
thenceforth as sovereign mistress over the great lords and over the
nation; we have seen how it slowly fell in public respect and veneration,
and how it attempted unsuccessfully to respond to the confused wishes of
a people that did not yet know its own desires or its own strength; we
shall henceforth see it, panting and without sure guidance, painfully
striving to govern and then to live. "I saw," says M. Malouet in his
_Memoires,_ "under the ministry of the archbishop (of Toulouse, and
afterwards of