CHAPTER 1.3.IV.
Lomenie's Edicts.
Thus, then, have the Notables returned home; carrying to all quarters of France, such notions of deficit, decrepitude, distraction; and that States-General will cure it, or will not cure it but kill it.

Each Notable, we may fancy, is as a funeral torch; disclosing hideous abysses, better left hid! The unquietest humour possesses all men; ferments, seeks issue, in pamphleteering, caricaturing, projecting, declaiming; vain jangling of thought, word and deed.
It is Spiritual Bankruptcy, long tolerated; verging now towards Economical Bankruptcy, and become intolerable.

For from the lowest dumb rank, the inevitable misery, as was predicted, has spread upwards.

In every man is some obscure feeling that his position, oppressive or else oppressed, is a false one: all men, in one or the other acrid dialect, as assaulters or as defenders, must give vent to the unrest that is in them.

Of such stuff national well-being, and the glory of rulers, is not made.