[Footnote 45: "On the very threshold of the business he must propose to make the clergy, the noblesse, the very Parliament subject to taxes! One shriek of indignation and astonishment reverberates through all the chateau galleries. M. de Maurepas has to gyrate. The poor king, who had written (to Turgot) a few weeks ago, '_Il n'y a que vous et moi qui aimions le peuple_' (There is none but you and I who love the people), must now write a dismissal, and let the French Revolution accomplish itself pacifically or not, as it can."--_Carlyle, French Revolution_, i., 41. "The nobles and the prelates, it seems, considered themselves degraded if they were to contribute to the repair of the roads; and they would no doubt have declared that their dignity and their existence, the very rights of property itself, were endangered, if they were now, for the first time, they would have said, in the history of the monarchy, to be subjected to the visits of the tax-gatherer."--_Lectures on the French Revolution, by Wm. Smyth_, vol. i., p. 102.] [Footnote 46: _Lit de justice_ was a proceeding in which the king, with his court, proceeded to the Parliament, and there, sitting upon the throne, caused those edicts which the Parliament did not approve to be registered in his presence.--_Encyclopædia Americana._] [Footnote 47: It is not necessary to allude to De Clugny, who immediately succeeded Turgot, but who held his office six months only and attempted nothing.] [Footnote 48: Woman in France, by Julia Kavanagh, p. 211. Memoirs of Marie Antoinette, by Madame Campan, vol. i., p. 375.] [Footnote 49: Hist. Phil. de la France, par Ant. Fantin Desodoards, t. i., p. 28. Audouin states that the war cost France, from 1778 to 1782, fourteen hundred millions of livres ($280,000,000).] [Footnote 50: "The queen never disguised her dislike to the American war. She could not conceive how any one could advise a sovereign to aim at the humiliation of England through an attack on the sovereign authority, and by assisting a people to organize a republican constitution. She often laughed at the enthusiasm with which Franklin inspired the French."--_Madame Campan's Mem. of Marie Antoinette_, ii., 29.] [Footnote 51: Lectures on Fr. Rev., by Wm. Smyth, i., 109.] [Footnote 52: Cor. Conf. de Louis XVI., ii., 178.] [Footnote 53: Lectures on the French Revolution, by William Smyth, i., 115.] [Footnote 54: "The notion that our maladies were incapable of remedy, and that no human mind could cure them, added keenly to the general grief. We saw ourselves plunged into a gulf of debts and public engagements, the interest alone of which absorbed the third part of the revenue, and which, far from being put into a course of liquidation, were continually accumulating by loans and anticipations."--_History of the French Revolution, by M. Rabaud de St. Etienne_, vol. i., p. 19.]