VIII
TURGOT: THE STATESMAN
Among Voltaire’s friends Turgot and Condorcet at least were not merely great, but also good men. Even Condorcet, though himself of virtuous and noble life, had not that high standard of living, that sterner modern code of purity and uprightness, which were remarkably Turgot’s.
But Turgot was something more even than the best man of his party. He was the best worker. While Voltaire clamoured and wept for humanity, while d’Alembert thought, Grimm wrote, Diderot talked, and Condorcet dreamed and died, Turgot laboured. Broad and bold in aim, he was yet content to do what he could. Of him it might never be said ‘L’amour du mieux t’aura interdit du bien.’ To do one’s best here and now, with the wretched tools one has to hand, in the teeth of indolence, obstinacy, and the spirit of routine, to compromise where one cannot overcome, and instead of sitting picturing some golden future, to do at once the little one can—that was this statesman’s policy.
ANNE-ROBERT-JACQUES TURGOT.
From an Engraving by Le Beau, after the Portrait by Troy.
It was so far successful, that all men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot.
His father was the Provost of Merchants in Paris, and has earned the gratitude of Parisians by enlarging the Quai de l’Horloge and joining it by a bridge to the opposite bank of the Seine, and by erecting the fountain in the Rue de Grenelle de St. Germain.