She had been married but little more than a year when the first shadow of coming events dimmed the lustre of her new existence. In a speech pronounced at the Assembly of Notables in April 1787, M. de Calonne impugned the accuracy of the famous _Compte Rendu_. M. Necker indignantly demanded from the King the permission to hold a public debate on the subject, in the presence of the Assembly before which he had been accused. Louis XVI. refused; and M. Necker then immediately published a memoir of self-justification. The result was a _lettre de cachet_ which exiled him to within forty leagues of Paris. The order, conveyed by Le Noir, the Minister of Police, reached M. Necker in the evening, when he was sitting in his wife’s salon, surrounded by his daughter and some friends. The liveliness of Madame de Staël’s indignation may be imagined. She has described it herself in her _Considérations sur la Révolution Française_, and declared that the King’s decision appeared to her an unexampled act of despotism. Its parallel would not have been far to seek, and acts a thousand times worse disgrace every page of the annals of France. But Madame de Staël, always incapable of judging where the “pure and noble” interests of her father were concerned, can be pardoned for her exaggeration in this instance, as she had half France to share it. “All Paris,” she says, “came to visit M. Necker in the twenty-four hours that preceded his departure. Even the Archbishop of Toulouse, already practically designated for M. de Calonne’s successor, was not afraid to make his bow.” Offers of shelter poured in upon M. Necker, and the best châteaux in France were placed at his disposal. He finally elected the Châteaux de Marolles, near Fontainebleau, although not, as he naïvely confesses in a letter to his daughter, without some secret misgivings as to “the decided taste in all things good and bad of dear mamma.”