e, but in being King of the French, and the heart of your subjects
in the fairest of your domains." The assembly of the clergy granted to
the treasury only a poor gift of eighteen hundred thousand livres.

All the resources were exhausted, disgraceful tricks had despoiled the
hospitals and the poor; credit was used up, the payments of the State
were backward; the discount-bank (_caisse d'escompte_) was authorized to
refuse to give coin. To divert the public mind from this painful
situation, Brienne proposed to the king to yield to the requests of the
members of Parliament, of the clergy, and of the noblesse themselves.
A decree of August 8, 1788, announced that the States-general would be
convoked May 1, 1789: the re-establishment of the plenary court was
suspended to that date. Concessions wrested from the weakness and
irresolution of governments do not strengthen their failing powers.
Brienne had exhausted his boldness as well as his basenesses; he
succumbed beneath the outcry of public wrath and mistrust. He offered
the comptroller-generalship to M. Necker, who refused. "He told XVI.
"Mercy," is the expression in Brienne's own account, "that under a
minister who, like me, had lost the favor of the public, he could not do
any good." A court-intrigue at last decided the minister's fall. The
Count of Artois, egged on by Madame de Polignac, made urgent entreaties
to the queen; she was attached to Brienne; she, however, resigned herself
to giving him up, but with so many favors and such an exhibition of
kindness towards all his family, that the public did not feel at all
grateful to Marie Antoinette. Already Brienne had exchanged the
archbishopric of Toulouse for that of Sens, a much richer one. "The
queen offered me the hat and anything I might desire," writes the
prelate, "telling me that she parted from me with regret, weeping at
being obliged to do so, and permitting me to kiss her (_l'embrasser_) in
token of her sorrow and her interest." "After having made the mistake of
bringing him into the ministry," says Madame Campan [_Memoires,_ t. i.
p. 33], "the queen unfortunately made an equally grave one in supporting
him at the time of a disgrace brought upon him by the despair of the
whole nation. She considered it only consistent with her dignity to give
him, at his departure, ostensible proofs of her esteem, and, her very
sensibility misleading her, she sent him her portrait adorned with
precious stones and t