M.de Calonne, finding it advisable to trace to a very remote period the causes of the present condition of the finances, was not afraid, in pursuance of this end, to have recourse to means with which he will, probably, sooner or later reproach himself; he declared in a speech, now circulated throughout Europe, that the Report to his Majesty, in 1781, was so extraordinarily erroneous, that, instead of the surplus published in that Report, there was, at that very time, an enormous deficit." At the moment when M.Necker was publishing, as regarded the statements of M.de Calonne, an able rectification which did not go to the bottom of things any more than the Report had previously gone, the comptroller-general was succumbing beneath his enemies' attacks and his own errors.

Justly irritated at the perfidious manoeuvres practised against him by the keeper of the seals in secretly heading at the Assembly of notables the opposition of the magistracy, Calonne had demanded and obtained from the king the recall of M.Miromesnil.

He was immediately superseded by M.de Lamoignon, president of the parliament of Paris and a relative of M.de Malesherbes.

The comptroller-general had the imprudence to push his demands further; he required the dismissal of M.de Breteuil.

"I consent," said Louis XVI.