the Queen.--Preparations for the Meeting of the States-
general.--Long Disuse of that Assembly.--Need of Reform.--Vices Of the Old
Feudal System.--Necker's Blunders in the Arrangements for the Meeting of
the States.--An Edict of the King concedes the Chief Demands of the
Commons.--Views of the Queen.

The whole kingdom was thrown into great and dangerous excitement by these
transactions. Little as were the benefits which the people had ever
derived from the conduct of the Parliament, their opposition to the
archbishop, who had already had time to make himself generally hated and
despised, caused the councilors to be very generally regarded as champions
of liberty; and in the most distant provinces, in Bearn, in Isere, and in
Brittany, public meetings (a thing hitherto unknown in the history of the
nation) were held, remonstrances were drawn up, confederacies were formed,
and oaths were administered by which those who took them bound themselves
never to surrender what they affirmed to be the ancient privileges of the
nation.

The archbishop became alarmed; a little, perhaps, for the nation and the
king, but far more for his own place, which he had already contrived to
render profitable to himself by the preferments which it had enabled him
to engross. And, in the hope of saving it, he now entreated Necker to join
the Government, proposing to yield up the management of the finances to
him, and to retain only the post of prime minister.

A letter from the queen to Mercy shows that she acquiesced in the scheme.
Her disapproval of Necker's past conduct was outweighed by her sense of
the need which the State had of his financial talents; though, for reasons
which she explains, she was unwilling wholly to sacrifice the archbishop;
and the letter has a further interest as displaying some of the
difficulties which arose from the peculiar disposition of the king, while
every one was daily more and more learning to look upon her as the more
important person in the Government. On the 19th of August, 1783, she
writes to Mercy,[1] whom the archbishop had employed as his agent to
conciliate the stubborn Swiss Banker:

"The archbishop came to me this morning, immediately after he had seen
you, to report to me the conversation which he had had with you. I spoke
to him very frankly, and was touched by what he said. He is at this moment
with the king, to try and get him to decide; but I very much fear that M.
Necker will not accept w