With a miraculous Fortunatus' Purse in his Treasury, it might have lasted longer; with such Purse indeed, every French Controller-General, that would prosper in these days, ought first to provide himself.

But here again may we not remark the bounty of Nature in regard to Hope?
Man after man advances confident to the Augean Stable, as if he could clean it; expends his little fraction of an ability on it, with such cheerfulness; does, in so far as he was honest, accomplish something.

Turgot has faculties; honesty, insight, heroic volition; but the Fortunatus' Purse he has not.

Sanguine Controller-General! a whole pacific French Revolution may stand schemed in the head of the thinker; but who shall pay the unspeakable 'indemnities' that will be needed?
Alas, far from that: on the very threshold of the business, he proposes that the Clergy, the Noblesse, the very Parlements be subjected to taxes! One shriek of indignation and astonishment reverberates through all the Chateau galleries; M.de Maurepas has to gyrate: the poor King, who had written few weeks ago, 'Il n'y a que vous et moi qui aimions le peuple (There is none but you and I that has the people's interest at heart),' must write now a dismissal; (In May, 1776.) and let the French Revolution accomplish itself, pacifically or not, as it can.
Hope, then, is deferred?
Deferred; not destroyed, or abated.

Is not this, for example, our Patriarch Voltaire, after long years of absence, revisiting Paris?
With face shrivelled to nothing; with 'huge peruke a la Louis Quatorze, which leaves only two eyes "visible" glittering like carbuncles,' the old man is here.