"Brigands!" I cried, filled with indignation which I was unable to contain. "Is that how you understand liberty?" Had I had a gun, I should have fired at those wretches as at a pack of wolves. They shouted and yelled; they beat long at the doors of the gate-way, in the hope of breaking them down and adding my head to those of their victims. My sisters fainted; the poltroons of the lodging-house overwhelmed me with reproaches. The murderers, who were being pursued, had not time to break into the house, and passed on. Those heads, and others which I saw soon afterwards, changed my political tendencies; I held the banquets of cannibals in abhorrence, and the idea of leaving France for some distant country began to take root in my mind. * Recalled to office on the 25th of July, installed and received with festivities, M. Necker, the third successor, after Calonne and Taboureau[347], of Turgot[348], was soon left behind by events, and lapsed into unpopularity. It is one of the singular facts of the time that so serious a person should have been raised to the post of minister through the tact of a man noted for such mediocrity and levity as the Marquis de Pezay[349]. The _Compte rendu_[350], which replaced in France the system of taxation by that of loans, stirred people's ideas: women talked of receipts and expenditure; for the first time one saw, or thought one saw, something in the mechanism of figures. These calculations, painted in colours laid on _à la Thomas_[351], had first established the reputation of the director-general of finance. The banker was a clever accountant, but a resourceless economist; a noble but turgid writer; an honest man, but devoid of the loftier virtues. He was like the character which speaks the prologue in a classical play, and which disappears at the rise of the curtain, after explaining the piece to the audience. M. Necker was the father of Madame de Staël[352]: his vanity hardly permitted him to believe that his true title to the recollection of posterity lay in the fame achieved by his daughter.