'You find the queen in great affliction,' he said to me: 'she has great reason to be.

But what then! They would not see in this business anything save a prince of the church and the prince of Rohan, whereas it is only the case of a man in want of money and a mere dodge for raising the wind, wherein the cardinal has been swindled in his turn.

Nothing can be easier to understand, and it needs no Alexander to cut this Gordian knot.'" Guilty in the king's eyes, a dupe according to the judgment of history, Cardinal Rohan was exiled to his abbey of Chaise-Dieu, less to be pitied than the unhappy queen abruptly wrenched from the sweet dreams of a romantic friendship and confidence, as well as from the nascent joys of maternal happiness, to find herself henceforth confronting a deluded people and an ever increasing hostility which was destined to unjustly persecute her even to the block.
M.de Calonne had taken little part in the excitement which the trial of Cardinal Rohan caused in court and city he was absorbed by the incessantly recurring difficulties presented by the condition of the treasury; speculation had extended to all classes of society; loans succeeded loans, everywhere there were formed financial companies, without any resources to speak of, speculating on credit.

Parliament began to be alarmed, and enregistered no more credits save with repugnance.

Just as he was setting out on a trip to Normandy, which afforded him one of the last happy days of his life and as it were a dying flicker of his past popularity, the king scratched out on the registers of the Parliament the restrictions introduced by the court into the new loan of eighty millions presented by M.de Calonne.