O Lomenie, what a wild-heaving, waste-looking, hungry and angry world hast thou, after lifelong effort, got promoted to take charge of! Lomenie's first Edicts are mere soothing ones: creation of Provincial Assemblies, 'for apportioning the imposts,' when we get any; suppression of Corvees or statute-labour; alleviation of Gabelle.

Soothing measures, recommended by the Notables; long clamoured for by all liberal men.
Oil cast on the waters has been known to produce a good effect.

Before venturing with great essential measures, Lomenie will see this singular 'swell of the public mind' abate somewhat.
Most proper, surely.

But what if it were not a swell of the abating kind?
There are swells that come of upper tempest and wind-gust.

But again there are swells that come of subterranean pent wind, some say; and even of inward decomposion, of decay that has become self-combustion:--as when, according to Neptuno-Plutonic Geology, the World is all decayed down into due attritus of this sort; and shall now be exploded, and new-made! These latter abate not by oil .-- The fool says in his heart, How shall not tomorrow be as yesterday; as all days,--which were once tomorrows?
The wise man, looking on this France, moral, intellectual, economical, sees, 'in short, all the symptoms he has ever met with in history,'-- unabatable by soothing Edicts.
Meanwhile, abate or not, cash must be had; and for that quite another sort of Edicts, namely 'bursal' or fiscal ones.