Six months afterwards his attitude had changed. The manifest determination of Fleury to repress every influence but his own, combined with a sudden crisis in public affairs to destroy the tone of tolerance or esteem with which d'Argenson had continued to regard him. In July, 1739, he writes: "The rumours are growing that the tyranny of the Cardinal is nearing its close. I say tyranny; for when all is said, nothing is more hateful than the government of an old tutor, without birth and without ability, eighty-six years of age, choked with self-love and with a mania for ruling, leaning on subordinates worse than himself, whom he maintains without question, and ousting his king from the government at his own will and pleasure."[237] In a letter to Chauvelin (April 24th) he had expressed the tone which is henceforth assumed. "Our affairs abroad continue to move only by the impetus which you have given them. As to the rest, it is left to chance, and to a star which may pale. The unity of policy is lost; general plans are treated as chimerical systems, or as 'great questions,' which certainly do create genuine terror among the smallest heads which our nation has ever seen at its own."[238] So runs the tale for many years. General declamation against the incompetence of the ministers is exchanged for a scathing relentless impeachment of every branch of the administration. The Journal of 1739 contains some of the most terrible pictures ever drawn of the internal condition of France; and the government of the interior is arraigned with all the triumphant detail of an unanswerable indictment. When the extreme of misery had passed, there remained the vicissitudes of foreign policy to sharpen the bitterness of d'Argenson's pen. The war of the Indies, the crisis in the Empire, gave occasion for many a philippic against the senile absurdity of the Cardinal's statecraft.[239] Nor was this all; for his hand is continually upon the Cardinal's pulse; his eyes are perpetually bent upon the King; his own prospects are weighed in an ever-changing balance; and d'Argenson, King and Cardinal are canvassed until the reader is sick and weary of them all. Occasionally the narrative is divested alike of dignity and of reason; and we sometimes meet with a rude savagery of feeling and expression which suggest that beneath d'Argenson's usual beauty of heart there lurked unsightly possibilities. Such are the facts, unpleasing enough; it remains to determine their critical value.