An old councillor had but lately said to him, when he was calling for the States-general with all his might, "Providence will punish your fatal counsels by granting your wishes." After the triumph of his return to Paris, amidst the desert which was forming around the Parliament, "the martyr, the hero of liberty," as his enthusiastic admirers had been wont to call him, had to realize that instability of human affairs and that fragility of popularity to which he had shut his eyes even in his prison, when Mirabeau, ever biting and cynical, wrote to one of his friends "Neighborhood will doubtless procure you a visit from that immense D'Espremesnil, the sage commentator upon Mesmer, who, from the Isles of St.Marguerite even unto this place, has made everybody laugh at the ostentation with which he shook his fetters to make them clank." The troubles amongst the populace had subsided, but agitation amongst the thoughtful went on increasing, and the embarrassments of M.Necker increased with the agitation amongst the thoughtful.

Naturally a stranger to politics properly so called, constantly engaged as he was in finance or administration, the minister's constitutional ideas were borrowed from England; he himself saw how inapplicable they were to the situation of France.

"I was never called upon," he says in his _Memoirs,_ "to examine closely into what I could make, at the time of my return to office, of my profound and particular esteem for the government of England, for, if at a very early period my reflections and my conversation could not but show symptoms of the opinions I held, at a very early period, also, I perceived how averse the king was from anything that might resemble the political practices and institutions of England." "M.

Necker," says M.Malouet, "showed rare sagacity in espying in the greatest detail and on the furthest horizon the defects, the inconveniences of every measure, and it was this faculty of extending his observations to infinity which made him so often undecided." What with these doubts existing in his own mind, and what with the antagonistic efforts of parties as well as individual wills, the minister conceived the hope of releasing himself from the crushing burden of his personal responsibility; he convoked for the second time the Assembly of notables.
Impotent as it was in 1787, this assembly was sure to be and was even more so in 1788.

Mirabeau had said with audacious intuition: "It is no longer a question of what has been, but of what has to be." The notables clung to the past like shipwrecked mariners who find themselves invaded by raging waters.