ne to my son, I shall willingly die."

One of the measures which Mirabeau strongly urged, and as to which Marie
Antoinette hesitated, balancing the difficulties to which it was not
unlikely to give rise against the advantages which were more obvious, was
arranged without her intervention. Necker had but one panacea for all the
ills of a defective constitution or an ill-regulated government--the
re-establishment of the finances of the country; and, as public confidence
is indispensable to national credit, the troubles of the last year had
largely increased the embarrassments of the Treasury. He was also but
scantily endowed with personal courage. In the denunciations of Marat he
had not been spared, and by the beginning of September fear had so
predominated over every other feeling in his mind that he resolved to quit
a country which, as he was not one of her sons, seemed to him to have no
such claim on his allegiance that he should imperil his life for her sake.
But in carrying out his determination, he exhibited a strange
forgetfulness, not only of the respect due to his royal master as king,
but also of all the ordinary rules of propriety; for he did not resign his
office into the hands of the sovereign from whom he had received it, but
he announced his retirement to the Assembly, sending the president of the
week a letter in which he attributed his reasons for the step partly to
his health, which he described as weak, and partly to the "mortal
anxieties of his wife, as virtuous as she was dear to his heart." It was
hardly to be wondered at that the members present were moved rather to
laughter than to sympathy by this sentimental effusion. They took no
notice of the letter, and passed to the order of the day; and certainly,
if it afforded evidence of his amiable disposition, it supplied proof at
least equally strong of the weakness of his character, and of his
consequent unfitness for any post of responsibility at such a time.

It was more to his credit that he at the same time placed in the treasury
a sum of two millions of francs to cover any incorrectness which might be
discovered or suspected in his accounts, and any loss which might be
sustained from the depreciation of the paper money lately issued under his
administration, though not with his approbation. All the rest of his
colleagues retired at the same time, except the foreign secretary, M.
Montmorin. They had recently been attacked with great violence in th