"The harvest and the crops of all sorts were in danger of perishing; they could not be gathered for the continual rains; the poor labourer was looking out for a moment of dry weather in order to get them in. Yet for all that this whole district was beaten with several scourges. The peasants had been carried off to put the roads by which the Queen was to pass into fit condition; and they were only the worse, so much so that Her Majesty often thought she would drown; they had to drag her from her carriage by main force as they could. In several places she and her suite were swimming in the water, which lay over the whole country, and that in spite of the infinite pains expended by a tyrannical ministry."[141]
And further on he says:
"In the evening, after supper, I went for a stroll round the market-place of Sezanne. For a moment the rain had ceased. I spoke to some poor peasants, who had their horses with them, attached to the tail of a cart, and standing in the night without provender. Some of them told me that their horses had had nothing to eat for three days. They were harnessing ten in the place of four; judge how much of them remained!"[142]
One can scarcely pretend, by fragments of translation, to convey even a shade of the impression produced by these whole passages, and by many that deserve to stand beside them. After reading them, and allowing them to leaven and lighten one's whole conception of d'Argenson's character, it is with keen pleasure we meet with a luminous remark in the pages of one of his most accomplished critics:
"C'est par le cœur, en effet, que son esprit est grand," says M. Aubertin;[143] and it is the happiest word that has been devoted to d'Argenson.
We have but to accept it, and we are enabled to remit to their due place those small distempers, those accidents of the inauspicious moment, which have often hardened the regard of criticism; we see how very little they appear by the side of what was greatest and best in d'Argenson. Qualities are virtuous in proportion as they are necessary; and events have thrown a suggestive light upon the relative value of the various virtues in the France of the Eighteenth Century. We see that there was something more real and rare than those elegant adornments, those small dexterities, which were then so dearly prized: that they afford but thin subsistence for a society bereft of honesty, devotion, depth of vision, and soundness of heart. Those qualities d'Argenson possessed, and the children of this world laughed at him. Their generation does not last for ever; and we, who are on the hither side of 1793, may be excused for thinking that, with all the failings that whetted their wit, there were very few among them who could be mentioned in a breath with the man they honoured by their laughter.
D'Argenson could feel, but he was no sentimentalist. The years which he now passed in obscurity were among the happiest and most fruitful of his life.