the financial genius of the great minister as his
calm and heroic deportment on trying occasions, whether on the
battle-field or in the council-chamber, does of his natural authority
over his fellow-men. The scheme was devised to put money in the king's
coffers, which at that moment were completely empty. Its chief features
were to create a great many new offices in the various courts of justice
and tribunals of administration, all to be disposed of by sale to the
highest bidder; to extort a considerable loan from the chief courtiers
and from the richest burghers in the principal towns; to compel all the
leading peculators--whose name in the public service was legion--to
disgorge a portion of their ill-gotten gains, on being released from
prosecution; and to increase the tax upon salt.

Such a project hardly seems a masterpiece of ethics or political economy,
but it was hailed with rapture by the needy monarch. At once there was a
wild excitement amongst the jobbers and speculators in places. The
creation of an indefinite number of new judgeships and magistracies, to
be disposed of at auction, was a tempting opportunity even in that age of
corruption. One of the most notorious traders in the judicial ermine,
limping Robin de Tours by name, at once made a private visit to Madame de
Rosny and offered seventy-two thousand crowns for the exclusive right to
distribute these new offices. If this could be managed to his
satisfaction, he promised to give her a diamond worth two thousand
crowns, and another, worth six thousand, to her husband. The wife of the
great minister, who did not comprehend the whole amount of the insult,
presented Robin to her husband. She was enlightened, however, as to the
barefaced iniquity of the offer, when she heard De Bethune's indignant.
reply, and saw the jobber limp away, crest-fallen and amazed. That a
financier or a magistrate should decline a bribe or interfere with the
private sale of places, which were after all objects of merchandise, was
to him incomprehensible. The industrious Robin, accordingly, recovering
from his discomfiture, went straightway to the chancellor, and concluded
the same bargain in the council chamber which had been rejected by De
Bethune, with the slight difference that the distribution of the places.
was assigned to the speculator for seventy-five thousand instead of
seventy-two thousand crowns. It was with great difficulty that De
Bethune, who went at once to the king