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67. Elisabeth VigeeLebrun, Calonne
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only master, the King, the most prominent document on his desk is the charter for the Caisse d'Amortissement—the "Sinking Fund" supposed to husband resources that could be devoted to reducing the principal of the immense national debt. But it was Calonne, not the debt, that would be sunk by 1787.
And when Calonne's reputation for prodigality and opulence became impossible to shake off, his portrait would read like a glorified tailor's account. There are the lace cuffs a la valencienne and the Florentine taffeta coat, all from Vanzut and Dosogne, the sharpest and most expensive clothiers in Paris. There are the grandiose inkwells from the Queen's jeweler, Granchez on the quai de Conti, where Calonne had bought a bamboo cane topped with an elaborate gold pommel that was the talk of the Palais-Royal. The painting almost smells of the lavender water that he was known to favor. The Controller-General made no attempt to disguise his taste for costly luxuries. He dressed his many servants in full livery and provided fur-lined seats not just for the interior of his coaches but to keep his coachmen warm in winter. Apart from the Controle itself, which he
redecorated from top to bottom, he could choose to reside in one of two chateaux or in the house on the rue Saint-Dominique, where his spectacular collection of paintings—Watteau, Rembrandt, Titian, Giorgione, Boucher, Fra-gonard and Teniers—was housed.
His kitchen was equally famous or notorious, depending on whether one was on the regular guest list. The head chef, Olivier, presided like a baron over a huge equipe of sauciers, patissiers and other specialists of the table. There were three servants alone to look after the roasted meats, with their own assigned kitchen boy called Tintin. Calonne had a weakness for truffles, which he had sent in baskets from Perigord, for fresh crayfish, young partridge and, more surprisingly, "macarony de Naples" eaten with Parmesan or Gruyere, a dish which one would have thought incompatible with lace cuffs. When he went from his own unofficial palace to the official one at Versailles, Calonne was sure to reproduce its splendors on a suitably regal scale. Under his regime the last balls of Versailles were thrown with an elegant abandon that for generations of nostalgic admirers to come would create the vision of the old monarchy forever moving at the pace of a minuet, while marble fountains threw perfumed water into scalloped bowls.
This was all very well as long as loans continued to be funded and the economic climate remained fair. But the outlook in all these matters dark- ened considerably from 1785. In Amsterdam, the prospect of further loans at low rates of interest had been complicated by a political crisis that threatened to become a revolution. A bad drought that summer had produced the worst harvest for some time. That in turn seemed likely to
deplete the purchasing power of French consumers and worsen a market which had already been seriously damaged by the inflow of British manu- factures following the commercial treaty.
When all this bad news was coupled with the Diamond Necklace Affair, a punishingly critical gloss could be put on Calonne's stewardship of the nation's affairs. For all the strenuous efforts of the police to stanch the flow, the demand for scurrilous pamphlets and libels was too great and the supply too forthcoming to gag opposition. In their view, Calonne's financial prodigality somehow became associated with the extravagances of the court, with conspiracy, mendacity and self-indulgence. It was at this time that the story of his delivering to Mme Vigee-Lebrun a box of pastilles, each wrapped in a three-hundred-livre note, first circulated. He was, in fact, rumored to be her lover, a story she later attributed to his actual mistress the Comtesse de Ceres borrowing her carriage for the theater and deliberately leaving it outside Calonne's residence all night for the gossips to identify.
Many of Calonne's most conspicuous initiatives could, with little effort, be made to look like conspiracies against the public interest. In 1785, on the advice of a broker, Modinier, he decided to remint the currency, adjusting its gold-silver ration in line with market rates. Anticipating some confusion, the Controller-General provided for a year of grace before the new coin definitively replaced the old. But to shopkeepers or country millers with boxes under the bedstead, the scheme was a thinly disguised act of extortion that would replace "good" money with "bad." Similarly the new customs wall for the Farmers-General (since Paris was not to enjoy the freedom from internal duties allowed to the rest of the country) aroused deep suspicions. Commissioned by Lavoisier, the visionary neoclassical architect Le-doux had designed stunning propylaea with antique figures and motifs to adorn the several barrier-gateways, but this did nothing to disarm those suspicions (indeed the strangeness of the plan may even have reinforced them). The new wall, it was popularly said, would trap Parisians within an atmospherically foul prison by depriving them of the country air needed to ventilate their urban staleness, the source of contagions and epidemics. Someone even calculated the exact cubic amount of fresh air loss that would result from the new wall. No wonder, as the saying went, "le mur murant Paris rend Paris murmurant."
There were other similar charges of self-interest. Pretending to be a statesman, Calonne, it was said, was nothing more than a jumped-up specu- lator. His new Company of the Indies (launched to try to capitalize on the new opportunities opening up in south India) was a spurious enterprise designed to extract capital from the gullible with no prospect of foreseeable returns. Other choice contracts and companies, like the syndicate estab
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lished to steam-pump a fresh water supply for Paris, were rigged to give favorable advance terms to inside investors. Piece by piece, then, a portrait of Calonne was being put together that was much less flattering than Mme Vigee-I -ebrun's. He was the man who would gag the press, stifle the lungs, fleece the pockets, debase the currency, squander the national fortune and dance attendance on the court.
With his reputation in such difficulties, why would Calonne have embarked on so dangerous and radical a step as the Assembly of the Notables, where his entire authority was going to be opened to public scrutiny? The conventional answer is that he had no alternative, and that indeed is the view that he put to the King in August 1786 when he first broached the subject. The deficit on the current year he estimated at 80 million livres (and was subsequently discovered to be 112 million). It was thus consuming nearly 20 percent of current revenue. But a much larger proportion had to be assigned to interest payments on back loans. Worse still, the relatively rapid redemption schedule accepted by Necker during the American war meant that substantial payments fell due in the following year. Yet more loans were not inconceivable, but as Calonne had
discovered in December 1785 when he had attempted to float the latest round, they could no longer be secured on advances from current or future revenues. That meant that he had to do what he had all along wished to avoid: impose new taxes, less for their actual value than for collateral in public credit.
The King's response on being told of the plan to summon an Assembly of Notables that would legitimate the new tax was to retort, "Why, that is pure Necker that you are giving me." And it was indeed the sense of Necker breathing down his neck that surely spurred Calonne to his dramatic
proposal. In 1784 the old Director-General had published his Views on the Administration of the Finance of France and in the course of it had attacked Calonne's stewardship, especially for his addiction to new loans in peacetime. In the following year, when the Diamond Necklace scandal was at height, he returned from his Swiss exile to an enthusiastic welcome in Paris. Part of Calonne's decision to make public the gruesome truth of the deficit, and to present it as a near bankruptcy, was to refute the optimism of the Compte Rendu of 1781 with its cheerful view of surpluses between "ordinary" income and expenditure. Specifically, he said that in place of Necker's surplus he had actually found a deficit of some 40 million for that year.
Despite evidence of mounting public hostility, Calonne decided to play Necker's own game of appealing for public support. It was not just a