ances of his utter rout after a short experiment of twenty
months of power, will rise from that deplorable episode with the
conviction that a pacific renovation of France, an orderly
readjustment of her institutions, was hopelessly impossible. '_Si on
avait ete sage!_' those cry who consider the Revolution as a futile
mutiny. If people had only been prudent, all would have been
accomplished that has been accomplished since, and without the
sanguinary memories, the constant interpolations of despotism, the
waste of generous lives and noble purpose. And this is true. But
then prudence itself was impossible. The court and the courtiers
were smitten through the working of long tradition by judicial
blindness. If Lewis XVI. had been a Frederick, or Marie Antoinette
had been a Catherine of Russia, or the nobles had even been
stout-hearted gentlemen like our Cavaliers, the great transformation
might then have been gradually effected without disorder. But they
were none of these, and it was their characters that made the fate
and doom of the situation. As for the court, Vergennes used an
expression which suggests the very keyword of the situation. He had
been ambassador in Turkey, and was fond of declaring that he had
learnt in the seraglio how to brave the storms of Versailles.
Versailles was like Stamboul or Teheran, oriental in etiquette,
oriental in destruction of wealth and capital, oriental in
antipathy to a reforming grand vizier. It was the Queen, as we now
know by incontestable evidence, who persuaded the King to dismiss
Turgot, merely to satisfy some contemptible personal resentments of
herself and her creatures.[3] And it was not in Turgot's case only
that this ineptitude wrought mischief. In June 1789 Necker was
overruled in the wisest elements of his policy and sent into exile
by the violent intervention of the same court faction, headed by the
same Queen, who had procured the dismissal of Turgot thirteen years
earlier. And it was one long tale throughout, from the first hour of
the reign down to those last hours at the Tuileries in August 1792;
one long tale of intrigue, perversity, and wilful incorrigible
infatuation.

[3] _Cor. entre Marie Therese et le Comte Mercy-Argenteau_, vol. iii.

Nor was the Queen only to blame. Turgot, says an impartial
eye-witness--Creutz, the Swedish ambassador--is a mark for the most
formidable league possible, composed of all the great people in the
kingdom, all the parliaments,