I have often seen at the play in Paris allusions to passing events caught up with great cleverness, but I never saw any which were so with such palpable and general an interest.

Every piece of applause, when there was anything concerning Sully, seemed, so to speak, to bear a special character, a shade appropriate to the sentiment the audience felt; it was by turns that of sorrow and sadness, of gratitude and respect; the applause often came so as to interrupt the actor the moment it was foreseen that the sequel of a speech might be applicable to the public feeling towards M.Necker.

The players have been to make their excuses to the lieutenant of police, they established their innocence by proving that the piece had been on the list for a week.
They have been forgiven, and it was thought enough to take this opportunity of warning the journalists not to speak of M.Necker for the future-well or ill." M.Necker derived some balm from these manifestations of public feeling, but the love of power, the ambition that prompted the work he had undertaken, the bitterness of hopes deceived still possessed his soul.
When he entered his study at St.Ouen, and saw on his desk the memoranda of his schemes, his plans for reforming the gabel, for suppressing custom-houses, for extending provincial assemblies, he threw himself back in his arm-chair, and, dropping the papers he held in his hand, burst into tears.

Like him, M.Turgot had wept when he heard of the re-establishment of forced labor and jurands.
"I quitted office," says M.Necker, "leaving funds secured for a whole year; I quitted it when there were in the royal treasury more ready money and more realizable effects than had ever been there within the memory of man, and at a moment when the public confidence, completely restored, had risen to the highest pitch.
"Under other circumstances I should have been more appreciated; but it is when one can be rejected and when one is no longer essentially necessary that one is permitted to fall back upon one's own reflections.

Now there is a contemptible feeling which may be easily found lurking in the recesses of the human heart, that of preferring for one's retirement the moment at which one might enjoy the embarrassment of one's successor.