of
government and administration, that would certainly not have been
committed either by Colbert, in whom Turgot professed to seek his model,
nor by Gournai, who had been his master. It was a broad promise of
reforms which Turgot was by no means sure of being able to persuade the
king and his council to adopt. By prematurely divulging his projects, it
augmented the number of his adversaries, without being definite enough
to bring new friends.[46] Again, Turgot did nothing to redeem it by
personal conciliatoriness in carrying out the designs of a benevolent
absolutism. The Count of Provence, afterwards Lewis XVIII., wrote a
satire on the government during Turgot's ministry, and in it there is a
picture of the great reformer as he appeared to his enemies: 'There was
then in France an awkward, heavy, clumsy creature; born with more
rudeness than character, more obstinacy than firmness, more impetuosity
than tact; a charlatan in administration no less than in virtue, exactly
formed to get the one decried and to disgust the world with the other;
made harsh and distant by his self-love, and timid by his pride; as much
a stranger to men, whom he had never known, as to the public weal, which
he had never seen aright; this man was called Turgot.'

[Footnote 46: See Mauguin's _Etudes Historiques sur l'Administration de
l'Agriculture_, i. 353.]

It is a mistake to take the word of political adversaries for a man's
character, but adversaries sometimes only say out aloud what is already
suspected by friends. The coarse account given by the Count of Provence
shows us where Turgot's weakness as a ruler may have lain. He was
distant and stiff in manner, and encouraged no one to approach him. Even
his health went against him, for at a critical time in his short
ministry he was confined to bed by gout for four months, and he could
see nobody save clerks and secretaries. The very austerity, loftiness,
and purity, which make him so reverend and inspiring a figure in the
pages of the noble-hearted Condorcet, may well have been impediments in
dealing with a society that, in the fatal words of the Roman historian,
could bear neither its disorders nor their remedies.

The king had once said pathetically: 'It is only M. Turgot and I who
love the people.' But even with the king, there were points at which the
minister's philosophic severity strained their concord. Turgot was the
friend of Voltaire and Condorcet; he counted Christianity a form