MALESHERBES, Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignonde (1721-1794), minister and afterwards counsel for the defence of Louis XVI., came of a famous legal family, and was born at Paris on December 6, 1721. He too was destined for the legal profession, much to the surprise of Marcel, the famous dancing master, who declared that his pupil would never be able to dance well enough to be a soldier or a lawyer, and must therefore be a priest. The young lawyer soon proved his intellectual capacity, when he was appointed president of the cour des aides in the parlement of Paris in 1750 on the promotion of his father to be chancellor. One of the chancellor’s duties was to control the press, and this duty was entrusted to Malesherbes by his father during his eighteen years of office, and brought him into connexion with the public far more than his judicial functions. To carry it out efficiently he kept in communication with the literary leaders of Paris, and especially with Diderot, and Grimm even goes so far as to say that “without the assistance of Malesherbes the Encyclopédie would probably never have been published.” Though he met with abuse from all sides, there can be no doubt that it was the eminently judicious manner in which he carried out his objectionable duties which laid the foundation of his subsequent popularity. In 1771 he was called upon to mix in politics; the parlements of France had been dissolved, and a new method of administering justice devised by Maupeou, which was in itself commendable as tending to the better and quicker administration of justice, but pernicious as exhibiting a tendency to overcentralization, and as abolishing the hereditary “nobility of the robe,” which, with all its faults, had from its nature preserved some independence, and been a ...