The Protestant Edict is registered; to
the joy of Boissy d'Anglas and good Malesherbes: Successive Loan, all
protests expunged or else withdrawn, remains open,--the rather as few
or none come to fill it. States-General, for which the Parlement has
clamoured, and now the whole Nation clamours, will follow 'in five
years,'--if indeed not sooner. O Parlement of Paris, what a clamour was
that! "Messieurs," said old d'Ormesson, "you will get States-General,
and you will repent it." Like the Horse in the Fable, who, to be avenged
of his enemy, applied to the Man. The Man mounted; did swift execution
on the enemy; but, unhappily, would not dismount! Instead of five years,
let three years pass, and this clamorous Parlement shall have both seen
its enemy hurled prostrate, and been itself ridden to foundering (say
rather, jugulated for hide and shoes), and lie dead in the ditch.

Under such omens, however, we have reached the spring of 1788. By
no path can the King's Government find passage for itself, but is
everywhere shamefully flung back. Beleaguered by Twelve rebellious
Parlements, which are grown to be the organs of an angry Nation, it can
advance nowhither; can accomplish nothing, obtain nothing, not so much
as money to subsist on; but must sit there, seemingly, to be eaten up of
Deficit.

The measure of the Iniquity, then, of the Falsehood which has been
gathering through long centuries, is nearly full? At least, that of
the misery is! For the hovels of the Twenty-five Millions, the misery,
permeating upwards and forwards, as its law is, has got so far,--to the
very Oeil-de-Boeuf of Versailles. Man's hand, in this blind pain, is set
against man: not only the low against the higher, but the higher against
each other; Provincial Noblesse is bitter against Court Noblesse; Robe
against Sword; Rochet against Pen. But against the King's Government
who is not bitter? Not even Besenval, in these days. To it all men and
bodies of men are become as enemies; it is the centre whereon infinite
contentions unite and clash. What new universal vertiginous movement is
this; of Institution, social Arrangements, individual Minds, which once
worked cooperative; now rolling and grinding in distracted collision?
Inevitable: it is the breaking-up of a World-Solecism, worn out at last,
down even to bankruptcy of money! And so this poor Versailles Court,
as the chief or central Solecism, finds all the other Solecisms arrayed
against it. Most na