The first disaster of Turgot’s Controllership was the disaster that spoiled his Intendancy. In 1774-5 scarcity of bread made many distrust his edict restoring to them free trade in grain. With his firm hand over Louis’s shaking one he suppressed the bread riots of that winter, as it was never given to a Bourbon to suppress anything. But he would not in justice suppress, though he might have suppressed, Necker’s adverse pamphlet on the question, called ‘The Legislation and Commerce of Grain;’ though half the Encyclopædists, and many of Turgot’s personal friends, were led thereby to adopt the opinions of the solid Genevan banker. In the January of 1775, Turgot presented his Budget. The deficit left by Terrai was enormous. Let us pay then, said Turgot’s sound common-sense, the legitimate contracts of Government, not by your dear old remedy, taxation, for the ruined country can yield no more, but by limiting the expenses of that Government and of the Court. Officials and courtiers alike took as a judgment from Heaven the fact, that very shortly after this monstrous proposal, the audacious proposer was sharply attacked by the gout. Turgot’s Controllership lasted in all twenty months, and for seven of them he was very ill. When he was blamed once for overworking himself and trying to force everybody’s hand, ‘Why, do you not know,’ he answered simply, ‘in my family we die of gout at fifty?’ His present illness kept him in his room many weeks, but did not prevent him from dictating an enormous correspondence, and trying urgently to persuade his master to begin his economical reforms by having his coming coronation ceremonies performed cheaply at Paris, instead of expensively at Rheims; and to make good his professions of tolerance by omitting from the service the oath binding him to extirpate heretics. Of course Louis was too weak for these drastic measures; he characteristically contented himself by mumbling the oath, and the senseless expenses of the coronation were as large as ever. But Turgot, undaunted, went on working. In January 1776 he presented to the King what have been justly called the Six Fatal Edicts--the first for the suppression of _corvée_, four for the suppression of the offices interfering with the provisioning of Paris, and the sixth for the suppression of _jurandes_ or the government of privileged corporations. The first and sixth were the real cause of battle, and embodied one of the great aims of Turgot’s administration--to make the nobility and clergy contribute to the taxes.