As to the plans he proposed to meet this grave state of affairs, Louis Blanc declares that his frivolity was only upon the surface, [29] and that his designs were wise, bold, and strongly conceived. Other historians assert that he had no plan at all except to borrow money, spend it, and then borrow more.
However that might be, he spent enormous sums, lavished money upon the Princes and the Queen, for whom Saint Cloud was bought, and to whom he said upon one occasion—
“Madame, si c’est possible c’est fait; si c’est impossible, cela ce fera.” [30]
He and Vergennes were said to have wasted the revenues of France, but at any rate he spent money like a gentleman, and when, in 1787, he was dismissed from office, he did not possess an écu.
He was one of the earliest to emigrate, and at Coblentz he met his old love, Mme. de Harvelay, now a rich widow and willing to marry him. He spent her fortune, and later on tried to get employment under Napoleon, who would have nothing to do with him, and he died in comparative obscurity.
The royalist sympathies and associations of Mme. Le Brun made her particularly obnoxious to the Radical party, to whom lies and calumnies were all welcome as weapons to be used against political opponents. She was therefore assailed by shoals of libels, accusing her of a liaison with M. de Calonne, by people who were absolutely unknown to her.
One Gorsas, a violent Radical whom she had never seen or heard of, was especially violent in the atrocities he poured forth against her for no reason whatever. He was a political writer and afterwards a Jacobin, but met with his due reward, for he was arrested by the Revolutionists he admired so greatly, and guillotined.
M. Le Brun was just then building a house in the rue Gros-Chenet, and one of the reports spread was that M. de Calonne paid for it, although both M. and Mme. Le Brun were making money enough to afford themselves much greater expenditure than that.
Lisette complained bitterly to her husband, who only told her to let them talk, and treated the matter with indignant contempt.
But Lisette fretted and made herself unhappy, especially when a deliberate attempt was made to destroy her reputation by a certain Mme. S——, who lived in the rue Gros-Chenet, to which she herself had not yet removed.