In August, 1774, Turgot was made Controller-General. He appointed Condorcet his Inspector of Coinage at a salary of 240_l._ a year, a payment which Condorcet never accepted. The pair had work to do, which only they could do, and do together. The vexed subject of Trade in Grain--‘for a moment,’ says Robinet, ‘the whole question of the Revolution lay in this question of Grain’--incited them to fierce battle for what they took to be the cause of freedom against the cause of that well-meaning commonplace, Necker. Condorcet attacked Necker with a rare, fierce malignity, and wrote two stinging pamphlets on the subject which made him many enemies. But there were other reforms waiting the doing, less in importance then and greater in importance now. To curtail the advantages of the privileged classes, to open for commerce the rivers of central France, to abolish the slave trade, _Taille_ and _Corvée_, _Vingtième_ and _Gabelle_, and to make the nobility share in the taxation--these were the tasks into which this noble put his life and his soul. That every reform meant loss to himself, that all his interests were vested in the privileges he sought to destroy, that every human tie drew him towards the old order, makes his work for the new, more excellent than that of his fellow-workers. They had nothing to gain; Condorcet had everything to lose. In May, 1776, a Queen of one-and-twenty demanded that ‘le sieur Turgot fût chassé, même envoyé à la Bastille’; and, in part, she had her way, for her own ruin and that of France. Condorcet renounced his Inspectorship of Coinage; he would not serve under another master. Turgot’s death in 1781 was the first great sorrow of his life. His other friend, d’Alembert, won for him a seat in the French Academy in 1782; and in the next year he too died. Condorcet tended him to the last, with that quiet and generous devotion which says little and does much. D’Alembert left to him the task of providing annuities for two old servants, and Condorcet accepted the obligation as a privilege, and fulfilled it scrupulously in his own poverty and ruin. He was now not a little lonely. His relatives still resented his choice of a profession; his best friends were dead; the great Master of their party had preceded them. From ‘social duties falsely so called’ Caritat had long ago freed himself. He was three and forty years old, occupied in writing that ‘Life of Turgot’ which is a declaration of his own principles and policy, in contributing to the Encyclopædia, and in many public labours, when he first met Mademoiselle Sophie de Grouchy.