Terrai, profligate and dissolute--‘What does he want with a muff?’ said witty Mademoiselle Arnould when he had appeared with one in winter; ‘his hands are always in our pockets’--had left to his successor, debt, bankruptcy, chaos. The King was not quite twenty, weak with the amiable weakness which is often more disastrous in a ruler than vice. The Queen was nineteen, careless and gay, loving pleasure and her own way, and meaning to have both in spite of all the controllers in the world. Maurepas, being undisturbed by principles, would readily abandon his protégé if he perceived for himself the least danger in that patronage. Voltaire, indeed, wrote that he saw in Turgot’s appointment a new heaven and a new earth, and the enlightened among the people dreamt that the Millennium had come, but Voltaire was but a voice crying in the wilderness, and in the councils of State the people had neither lot nor part. Once again Turgot, realising to the full the difficulties, the impossibilities even, of his position, resolved to do what he could. Within a few hours of his appointment he wrote a long letter to the King, urging the absolute necessity of economy in every department, denouncing bribes, privileges, exemptions, and pleading--daring to plead--equality in the imposition of taxes. No bankruptcy, no increase of taxation, no loans--this was to be the motto of his Controllership. ‘I feel all the perils to which I expose myself,’ he wrote. He was not even religious in the sense--what a sense!--that officials were expected to be religious. ‘You have given me a Controller who never goes to Mass,’ grumbled Louis to Maurepas. ‘Sire,’ answered the Minister, very happily, ‘Terrai always went.’ The new Controllership was still a nine days’ wonder when Turgot restored throughout France what he had restored in Limoges--free trade in grain. In 1770 he had written on the subject some famous ‘Letters’ in answer to Terrai’s revocation of the edict and the witty ‘Dialogues’ of Galiani which supported that revocation. Then, bolder still, he suppressed an abominable piece of official jobbery, the _Pot de Vin_, or bribe of 100,000 crowns which the Farmers-General had always presented to the Controller when he signed a new edict. If the Farmers turned away sulkily, angry with a generosity they were by no means prepared to imitate, from the country came a long burst of passionate applause. ‘It is only M. Turgot and I who love the people,’ said the King. Well, this poor Louis did love them, but his was not the love that could stand firm by the man sent to save them. ‘Everything for the people, nothing by them,’ was Turgot’s motto, and, perhaps, his mistake. The King was to be the lever to raise his kingdom; and the weak tool broke in the Minister’s hand.