People did more than talk. The event gave rise to some of the most venomous tirades that indignation ever wrung from helplessness; and curiously enough, it was the starting point of that alert and violent opposition which vexed the country for forty years. The excitement occasioned by it had not subsided when a renewal of the great struggles between the Crown, the Clergy, and the Parlement, gave a new motive to popular passion. The clergy refused to administer extreme unction to those who had not accepted the Bull Unigenitus; they were opposed by the resolution of the Parlement of Paris; the Crown interfered on behalf of the clergy; and Church and Crown united their forces in an endeavour to coerce the Parlement. At the same time the attempt of the Controller-General Machault to force the vingtième upon clergy and people alike united the Church and the Parlement in opposition to the Crown. The Crown, incapable of pursuing a policy of its own, allowed itself to be buffetted between the two parties; it was regarded with alternate scorn and fury; and popular feeling rallied in support of the outraged Parlement of Paris. The Church too was feared, hated, and afterwards despised;[381] and every day added to the influence and prestige of the rising party of Enlightenment.[382] D'Argenson's attitude throughout the controversy may be summed in a single word. He was with the Parlement against the Church, and with both against the Crown. It is often an occasion of wonder that Machault's proposal to bring the clergy under the ordinary fiscal arrangements of the realm should have met with such violent opposition. In a single sentence d'Argenson reveals the reason:-- "These pamphlets" (for proving "that the King has the whole right and jurisdiction over the property of the clergy") "have been unfavourably received, their cause, their object, being nothing but money, the need of money, the Treasury already so full of money, the Ministry appearing to think so little of relieving the burden of the people, the Court spending right and left; and not a wise reformation of the clergy. That is the thing to excite the people against the soundest principles."[383] Such a passage alone is sufficient to show the deep distrust into which the Government had fallen. The organ of that distrust was the Parlement of Paris. D'Argenson at first had trembled for its existence; he soon saw that the forces behind it were irresistible. "In the general commotion," he writes, "the Parlement of Paris has nothing more to fear. The entire nation is rising in opposition to ungoverned and arbitrary will, and they have the Parlements at their head" (April, 1752).[384] So acute an observer could not fail to see that the most alarming features of the struggle were the indirect results which it might produce. It had scarcely begun when he devoted to it one of the boldest and most penetrating of all his reflections.