When Morris came to France, Necker was the most prominent man in the kingdom. He was a hard-working, well-meaning, conceited person, not in the least fitted for public affairs, a banker but not a financier, and affords a beautiful illustration of the utter futility of the popular belief that a good business man will necessarily be a good statesman. Accident had made him the most conspicuous figure of the government, admired and hated, but not looked down upon; yet Morris saw through him at a glance. After their first meeting, he writes down in his diary: "He has the look and manner of the counting-house, and, being dressed in embroidered velvet, he contrasts strongly with his habiliments. His bow, his address, say, 'I am the man.' ... If he is really a very great man, I am deceived; and yet this is a rash judgment. If he is not a laborious man, I am also deceived." He soon saw that both the blame and the praise bestowed on him were out of all proportion to his consequence, and he wrote: "In their anguish [the nobles] curse Necker, who is in fact less the cause than the instrument of their sufferings. His popularity depends now more on the opposition he meets with from one party than any serious regard of the other. It is the attempt to throw him down which saves him from falling; ... as it is, he must soon fall." To Washington he gave a fuller analysis of his character. "As to M. Necker, he is one of those people who has obtained a much greater reputation than he has any right to.... In his public administration he has always been honest and disinterested; which proves well, I think, for his former private conduct, or else it proves that he has more vanity than cupidity. Be that as it may, an unspotted integrity as minister, and serving at his own expense in an office which others seek for the purpose of enriching themselves, have acquired for him very deservedly much confidence. Add to this that his writings on finance teem with that sort of sensibility which makes the fortune of modern romances, and which is exactly suited to this lively nation, who love to read but hate to think. Hence his reputation. He ... [has not] the talents of a great minister. His education as a banker has taught him to make tight bargains, and put him upon his guard against projects. But though he understands man as a covetous creature, he does not understand mankind,—a defect which is remediless. He is utterly ignorant of politics, by which I mean politics in the great sense, or that sublime science which embraces for its object the happiness of mankind. Consequently he neither knows what constitution to form, nor how to obtain the consent of others to such as he wishes. From the moment of convening the states-general, he has been afloat upon the wide ocean of incidents. But what is most extraordinary is that M. Necker is a very poor financier. This I know will sound like heresy in the ears of most people, but it is true. The plans he has proposed are feeble and inept."
A far more famous man, Talleyrand, then Bishop of Autun, he also gauged correctly from the start, writing down that he appeared to be "a sly, cool, cunning, ambitious, and malicious man. I know not why conclusions so disadvantageous to him are formed in my mind, but so it is, and I cannot help it." He was afterwards obliged to work much in common with Talleyrand, for both took substantially the same view of public affairs in that crisis, and were working for a common end. Speaking of his new ally's plan respecting church property, he says: "He is bigoted to it, and the thing is well enough; but the mode is not so well. He is attached to this as an author, which is not a good sign for a man of business." And again he criticises Talleyrand's management of certain schemes for the finances, as showing a willingness "to sacrifice great objects for the sake of small ones ... an inverse ratio of moral proportion."
Morris was fond of Lafayette, and appreciated highly his courage and keen sense of honor; but he did not think much of his ability, and became at times very impatient with his vanity and his impractical theories. Besides, he deemed him a man who was carried away by the current, and could neither stem nor guide it. "I have known my friend Lafayette now for many years, and can estimate at the just value both his words and actions. He means ill to no one, but he is very much below the business he has undertaken; and if the sea runs high, he will be unable to hold the helm." And again, in writing to Washington: "Unluckily he has given in to measures ... which he does not heartily approve, and he heartily approves many things which experience will demonstrate to be dangerous."
The misshapen but mighty genius of Mirabeau he found more difficulty in estimating; he probably never rated it quite high enough. He naturally scorned a man of such degraded debauchery, who, having been one of the great inciters to revolution, had now become a subsidized ally of the court. He considered him "one of the most unprincipled scoundrels that ever lived," although of "superior talents," and "so profligate that he would disgrace any administration," besides having so little principle as to make it unsafe to trust him. After his death he thus sums him up: "Vices both degrading and detestable marked this extraordinary being. Completely prostitute, he sacrificed everything to the whim of the moment;—cupidus alieni prodigus sui; venal, shameless; and yet greatly virtuous when pushed by a prevailing impulse, but never truly virtuous, because never under the steady control of reason, nor the firm authority of principle. I have seen this man, in the short space of two years, hissed, honored, hated, mourned. Enthusiasm has just now presented him gigantic. Time and reflection will sink this stature." Even granting this to be wholly true, as it undoubtedly is in the main, it was nevertheless the fact that in Mirabeau alone lay the least hope of salvation for the French nation; and Morris erred in strenuously opposing Lafayette's going into a ministry with him. Indeed, he seems in this case to have been blinded by prejudice, and certainly acted very inconsistently; for his advice, and the reasons he gave for it, were completely at variance with the rules he himself laid down to Lafayette, with even more cynicism than common sense, when the latter once made some objections to certain proposed coadjutors of his: "I state to him ... that, as to the objections he has made on the score of morals in some, he must consider that men do not go into an administration as the direct road to heaven; that they are prompted by ambition or avarice, and therefore that the only way to secure the most virtuous is by making it their interest to act rightly."
Morris thus despised the king, and distrusted the chief political leaders; and, as he wrote Washington, he was soon convinced that there was an immense amount of corruption in the upper circles. The people at large he disliked even more than he did their advisers, and he had good grounds, too, as the following extract from his journal shows: "July 22d. After dinner, walk a little under the arcade of the Palais Royal, waiting for my carriage. In this period the head and body of M. de Toulon are introduced in triumph, the head on a pike, the body dragged naked on the earth. Afterwards this horrible exhibition is carried through the different streets. His crime is, to have accepted a place in the ministry. This mutilated form of an old man of seventy-five is shown to his son-in-law, Berthier, the intendant of Paris; and afterwards he also is put to death and cut to pieces, the populace carrying about the mangled fragments with a savage joy. Gracious God, what a people!"
He describes at length, and most interestingly, the famous opening of the states-general, "the beginning of the Revolution." He eyed this body even at the beginning with great distrust; and he never thought that any of the delegates showed especial capacity for grappling with the terrible dangers and difficulties by which they were encompassed. He comments on the extreme enthusiasm with which the king was greeted, and sympathizes strongly with Marie Antoinette, who was treated with studied and insulting coldness. "She was exceedingly hurt. I cannot help feeling the mortification which the poor queen meets with, for I see only the woman; and it seems unmanly to treat a woman with unkindness.... Not one voice is heard to wish her well. I would certainly raise mine if I were a Frenchman; but I have no right to express a sentiment, and in vain solicit those who are near me to do it." ... At last "the queen rises, and, to my great satisfaction, she hears, for the first time in several months, the sound of 'Vive la reine!' She makes a low courtesy, and this produces a louder acclamation, and that a lower courtesy."
The sympathy was for the woman, not the queen, the narrow-minded, absolute sovereign, the intriguer against popular government, whose policy was as heavily fraught with bale for the nation as was that of Robespierre himself. The king was more than competent to act as his own evil genius; had he not been, Marie Antoinette would have amply filled the place.
He characterized the carrying of "that diabolical castle," the Bastile, as "among the most extraordinary things I have met with." The day it took place he wrote in his journal, with an irony very modern in its flavor: "Yesterday it was the fashion at Versailles not to believe that there were any disturbances at Paris. I presume that this day's transactions will induce a conviction that all is not perfectly quiet."
He used the Bastile as a text when, shortly afterwards, he read a brief lesson to a certain eminent painter. The latter belonged to that class of artists with pen or pencil (only too plentiful in America at the present day) who always insist on devoting their energies to depicting subjects worn threadbare by thousands of predecessors, instead of working in the new, broad fields, filled with picturesque material, opened to them by their own country and its history. "The painter shows us a piece he is now about for the king, taken from the Æneid: Venus restraining the arm which is raised in the temple of the Vestals to shed the blood of Helen. I tell him he had better paint the storm of the Bastile."