from meddling with the corn question.
However accustomed the Parliament, as well as all the other public
bodies, might be to humiliations, it was exceedingly vexed by this
treatment, and obeyed with the greatest grief. The public was,
nevertheless, much affected by the conduct of the Parliament, and felt
that if the Finance Ministry had been innocent in the matter, the King
would have been pleased with what had taken place, which was in no
respect an attack on the absolute and unbounded authority of which he was
so vilely jealous.

In the country a somewhat similar incident occurred. The Parliament of
Burgundy, seeing the province in the direst necessity, wrote to the
Intendant, who did not bestir himself the least in the world. In this
pressing danger of a murderous famine, the members assembled to debate
upon the course to adopt. Nothing was said or done more than was
necessary, and all with infinite discretion, yet the King was no sooner
informed of it than he grew extremely irritated. He sent a severe
reprimand to this Parliament; prohibited it from meddling again in the
matter; and ordered the President, who had conducted the assembly, to
come at once to Court to explain his conduct. He came, and but for the
intervention of M. le Duc would have been deprived of his post,
irreproachable as his conduct had been. He received a sharp scolding
from the King, and was then allowed to depart. At the end of a few weeks
he returned to Dijon, where it had been resolved to receive him in
triumph; but, like a wise and experienced man, he shunned these
attentions, arranging so that he arrived at Dijon at four o'clock in the
morning. The other Parliaments, with these examples before them, were
afraid to act, and allowed the Intendants and their emissaries to have it
all their own way. It was at this time that those commissioners were
appointed, to whom I have already alluded, who acted under the authority
of the Intendants, and without dependence of any kind upon the
Parliaments. True, a court of appeal against their decisions was
established, but it was a mere mockery. The members who composed it did
not set out to fulfil their duties until three months after having been
appointed.

Then, matters had been so arranged that they received no appeals, and
found no cases to judge. All this dark work remained, therefore, in the
hands of D'Argenson and the Intendants, and it continued to be done with
the same harshness as ever.

Wi