Far off in the Vosges Madame La Motte, the little, proud, active woman with the furtive eyes, was closeted with the Cardinal de Rohan in his château of Saverne. She had, she told him, all but recovered her true place as a Valois; she needed aid for a very little time longer. Here was a bill upon a Jew, down on the plain in Nancy; quite a small bill—not a hundred and fifty pounds. The Cardinal backed her bill.
Marie Antoinette could not for the life of her have shown you the Scheldt on the map; she knew her own incompetence, the advice she proffered was null or uncertain, and, in any case, whatever slight suggestion she may have made was quite passed by in the counsels of her husband. From that moment Joseph was turned, if somewhat slowly, towards action. He would clear the Scheldt by force, and compel the Cabinet of Versailles to follow; he took his time and made his plan—but he did not succeed.
The advent of Calonne was not the least of the accidents that impeded him, and Calonne’s appointment with its large consequences was partly—as were now so many things—the work of the Queen. A man of fifty, provincial, a gentleman, a good lawyer, Calonne was also a friend of the Polignacs; and Marie Antoinette, on that account alone, supported his candidature to the Direction of Finance: when she knew him she grew to dislike him. He was intensely national, vigorous, gay, a trifle too rapid in thought, ambitious, virile with a Latin virility; he was of a type she could never affect, and it is certain that he despised her intellect and resented her interference with affairs—he probably showed it.
But once he was appointed to the Treasury, her distaste came too late. That department, as the entanglement of the public fortune increased in complexity, grew to absorb in importance every other. The complete autonomy of each Minister within his department (which was a necessary consequence of Autocracy and the mark of government at Versailles) left him independent of his colleagues. The vast consequence of any Exchequer Act at that moment and thenceforward made the Exchequer supreme over War, over Home, and even over Foreign affairs.
It is difficult to describe the man: his acts must describe him. It is enough to say that he was not corrupt, that he carried through his attempt with courage, that he spent the public money largely and gaily in order to forward his plan of procuring a large increase of revenue rather than a large reduction of expenditure; that he was saddled with the remains of the American War debt; was heir in office to the dishonest and incompetent Necker, and that, so far as mere administration could, it was he in particular who later opened the Revolution by one act of courage, and not without deliberation, when he clearly saw that an active nation needed action to live: for it was he who summoned the Notables and so convened the first of the Assemblies.
The winter of ’83-’84 was very hard. The new taxes—imposed in the desperate attempt to fill the Treasury during the preceding year, before Calonne came, were just beginning to tell. The new loans—which were Calonne’s own—hung over the prosperity of the State.... The Queen was at ease; the letters of Rohan no longer came for her to burn; he no longer crept by tricks into her presence.... Then there was “Figaro.” “Figaro” was being talked of more than ever.... The King must give his consent ... he had given it to a private stage.... Come, would he not give it for the public? The play lay there, in the minds of the leisured and the wealthy; it was potentially a destroyer of the State on which they battened; but boredom is stronger than appetite with the smart, and the smart urged “Figaro” on towards its full and final publicity.
The winter drew on towards spring. It still froze hard. Calonne continued loans and largesse. “To be free of a tangle, you must borrow; to borrow, you must be at ease; to be at ease, you must spend.” He spent largely upon the poor of Paris; he consented to fêtes; he took the thing at a charge. As a nation in the grasp of a dreadful foe might win through by loan upon loan and pouring out fresh millions, bribing colonial soldiers recklessly—five, six, seven, ten shillings a day, and to hell with the commissariat—so he in the grasp of an embarrassed fiscal system that was dying in an agony and that nothing could recover. Such procedure invited force of itself; it paved the way for a vast physical, armed change to effect renewal. With the old régime no man could have done anything, not the gayest or the most daring; and what régime has ever changed itself? Calonne was killing the old régime.