The debts of the king's brothers were paid; advantageous exchanges of royal lands were effected to their profit; the queen bought St.Cloud, which belonged to the Duke of Orleans; all the great lords who were ruined, all the courtiers who were embarrassed, resumed the pleasant habit of counting upon the royal treasury to relieve their wants.

The polite alacrity of the comptroller-general had subdued the most rebellious; he obtained for Brittany the right of freely electing its deputies; the states-hall at Rennes, which had but lately resounded with curses upon him, was now repeating a new cry of "Hurrah for Calonne!" A vote of the assembly doubled the gratuitous gift which the province ordinarily offered the king.

"If it is possible, it is done," the comptroller would say to applicants; "if it is impossible, it will get done." The captivation was general, the blindness seemed to be so likewise; a feverish impulse carried people away into all newfangled ways, serious or frivolous.

Mesmer brought from Germany his mysterious revelations in respect of problems as yet unsolved by science, and pretended to cure all diseases around the magnetic battery; the adventurer Cagliostro, embellished with the title of count, and lavishing gold by handfuls, bewitched court and city, and induced Councillor d'Epremesnil to say, "The friendship of M.de Cagliostro does me honor." At the same time splendid works in the most diverse directions maintained at the topmost place in the world that scientific genius of France which the great minds of the seventeenth century had revealed to Europe.

"Special men sometimes testify great disdain as regards the interest which men of the world may take in their labors, and, certainly, if it were merely a question of appraising their scientific merit, they would be perfectly right.