Meantime Choiseul had been disgraced, and on May tenth, 1774, the old King had died; Louis XVI now reigned. The inertia which marked the brilliant decadence of the Bourbon monarchy was finally overcome. The new social forces were partly emancipated. Facts were examined, and their significance considered. Bankruptcy was no longer a threatening phantom, but a menacing reality of the most serious nature. Retrenchment and reform were the order of the day. Necker was trying his promising schemes. There was, among them, one for a body consisting of delegates from each of the three estates,--nobles, ecclesiastics, and burgesses,--to assist in deciding that troublesome question, the regulation of imposts. The Swiss financier hoped to destroy in this way the sullen, defiant influence of the royal intendants. In Corsica the governor and the intendant both thought themselves too shrewd to be trapped, and secured the appointment from each of the Corsican estates of men who were believed by them to be their humble servants. The needy suitor, Charles de Buonaparte, was to be the delegate at Versailles of the nobility. They thought they knew this man in particular, but he was to prove as malleable in France as he had been in Corsica. Though nearly penniless, the noble deputy, with the vanity of the born courtier, was flattered, and accepted the mission, setting out on December fifteenth, 1778, by way of Italy with his two sons Joseph and Napoleon. With them were Joseph Fesch, appointed to the seminary at Aix, and Varesa, Letitia's cousin, who was to be sub-deacon at Autun. Joseph and Napoleon both asserted in later life that during their sojourn in Florence the grand duke gave his friend, their father, a letter to his royal sister, Marie Antoinette. As the grand duke was at that time in Vienna, the whole account they give of the journey is probably, though perhaps not intentionally, untrue. It was not to the Queen's intercession but to Marbeuf's powerful influence that the final partial success of Charles de Buonaparte's supplication was due. This is clearly proven by the evidence of the archives. To the general's nephew, bishop of Autun, Joseph, now too old to be received in a royal military school, and later Lucien, were both sent, the former to be educated as a priest. It was probably Marbeuf's influence also, combined with a desire to conciliate Corsica, which caused the herald's office finally to accept the documents attesting the Buonapartes' nobility.