CHAPTER LIX .-- --LOUIS XVI .-- M.

DE CALONNE AND THE ASSEMBLY OF NOTABLES.
1781-1787.
We leave behind us the great and serious attempts at reform.

The vast projects of M.Turgot, seriously meant and founded on reason, for all their somewhat imaginative range, had become, in M.Necker's hands, financial expedients or necessary remedies, honorably applied to the most salient evils; the future, however, occupied the mind of the minister just fallen; he did not content himself with the facile gratifications of a temporary and disputed power, he had wanted to reform, he had hoped to found; his successors did not raise so high their real desires and hopes.
M.Turgot had believed in the eternal potency of abstract laws; he had relied upon justice and reason to stop the kingdom and the nation on the brink of the abyss; M.Necker had nursed the illusion that his courage and his intelligence, his probity and his reputation would suffice for all needs and exorcise all dangers; both of them had found themselves thwarted in their projects, deceived in their hopes, and finally abandoned by a monarch as weak and undecided as he was honest and good.
M.de Turgot had lately died (March 20, 1781), in bitter sorrow and anxiety; M.Necker was waiting, in his retirement at St.Ouen, for public opinion, bringing its weight to bear upon the king's will, to recall him to office.

M.de Maurepas was laughing in that little closet at Versailles which he hardly quitted any more: "The man impossible to replace is still unborn," he would say to those who were alarmed at M.
Necker's resignation.

M.Joly de Fleury, councillor of state, was summoned to the finance-department; but so strong was the current of popular opinion that he did not take up his quarters in the residence of the comptroller-general, and considered himself bound to pay M.Necker a visit at St.Ouen.
Before experience had been long enough to demonstrate the error committed by M.de Maurepas in depriving the king of M.Necker's able and honest services, the veteran minister was dead (November 21, 1784).