There was at this time in Paris a man called Necker, with whom history would have little concern had not the accident of the Revolution later thrown his undetermined features into the limelight. He was a product of Geneva, a money-dealer therefore, and a Calvinist by birth and trade—in no way by individual conviction, for his energies had long been directed to the accumulation into his own hands of the wealth of others. His reputation as a solid business man was therefore high, and he was very rich; of moral reputation, as the Catholic French understand the term, he had none.[[4]] His dealings with the treasury had brought his name forward, and in a few months, under a different title, he replaced Turgot at the head of the embarrassed finances of the country!... Societies in dissolution do such things.
[4]. His vivacious and ugly daughter was to be a catch famous throughout Europe. Years later Fersen—of all men!—was suggested to her. Pitt in ’85 had a bite at her ill-gotten dowry. Luckily for the girl, she escaped him, but she married De Staël, became famous, wrote her lively and didactic comments on the Revolution, grew uglier still, showed a small black moustache, at last wore a turban and drove Napoleon to despair.
His conception of reform was what one might expect from such a lineage. He cooked the public accounts, flattered all to remain in power, was hopelessly void of any plan, and, to meet the crisis, just borrowed: the first of modern stock-jobbers to conduct a State, and the model to all others. He was destined to become a sort of symbol of liberty ... and therein he is an example to democracy as well as to money-changers.
To the signal folly of precipitating Turgot’s fall the Queen was content to add further marks of excess. As though her purchases earlier in the year had not been sufficient, she must buy bracelets now worth three years of her income—bracelets, the news of which reached Vienna—and she must give rein to every conceivable indulgence in the passion of gambling. All the world talked of it, and all that summer, as the influence of her new friends rose and as her careless excitement reached its limit, the fever grew.
At Marly, during the summer visit of the Court, later in the year at Fontainebleau, she carried on the scandal. One autumn night and day in this last place bankers from Paris kept the faro tables open for thirty-six hours; they were the hours before her birthday, and the Mass of All Saints was sung to a Court pale and crumpled with the lack of sleep. The morrow, her twenty-first birthday, was sour with the memory of the reproach against that debauch. The Court returned for the winter to Versailles, and Maria Theresa determined that it was time for the Queen’s brother, the Emperor Joseph, to make the journey he had long promised, and to stem these rapids which threatened to become a cataract in which everything might be swept away. Her scolding letters to her daughter were accompanied by active plans for the journey of her son. She expected, and not without reason, that that son’s advent would change all, for she knew that he would have the direct mission to persuade Louis to an operation, to relieve the imperfect marriage of the burden that pressed upon it, and to remove from the life of that young wife the intolerable nervous oppression whence all this increasing violence proceeded.
It is to the Emperor’s journey, therefore, that all one’s attention should be directed as one reads her life from the closing days of 1776 to his appearance in Paris, after repeated delays, in the spring of the following year.
Meanwhile that other spirit whose action was to come in upon her life, America, was born. The week that had seen Turgot’s dismissal had seen passed in Philadelphia the Pennsylvania Resolution of Separation from the English Crown, and in the keener intellectual life of Virginia it had seen produced upon the same day the first statement of those general principles which the Colonies had drawn from Rousseau and upon which were to be based, for whatever good or evil fortunes still attended it, the democracy of our time. The revolt grew from those skirmishes of ’75 that had begun a Civil War to the Separatist decisions of ’76; the strain upon England’s tenure of her empire increased, and Vergennes all the while watched closely, hoping from that embarrassment to find at one moment or another the opportunity for relieving his country from the permanent threat of an English war.
It was a difficult and a perilous game. A British success might be, or rather would be, followed by swift vengeance against the embarrassed and fettered Crown of France. The Cabinet of Versailles would need allies against what was believed to be an all-powerful navy, and for eighteen months Vergennes was working to obtain these allies, in spite of the terror which the British fleet inspired. This policy, whose ultimate results were to be so considerable and so unexpected, took a new shape upon a certain day which should perhaps be more memorable in the history of the United States than any other. I mean the 28th of November of this year 1776.
Early that morning, the weather being clear and the wind southerly, a pilot from the rocks of Belle Isle had made out three ships in the offing, but they were hull-down; later, he saw one bearing a strange, quite unknown flag. He sailed towards it. The colours were those of the new Republic, and the stars and stripes flew above a sloop of war that carried Franklin; she had with her two English prizes for companions. Franklin landed. Within three weeks he was in Paris, and by the first week of the New Year he was at Passy in the suburbs, the guest of Chaumont, from whose great house and wide park proceeded the careful intrigue by which the Thirteen States were finally established in their Independence.
All who can pretend to history have respect for Vergennes, but that respect is far heightened by the close reading of what followed.