title="22"/> Rohan has a total income of 2,500,000 a year, and is heavily in debt. So is Dillon, who spends six months of each year in hunting, and a great deal of the rest in less healthy occupation. However, they will contrive to find sixteen millions this time—and trust the King will return it in other ways. The Abbé de Périgord,7 pale, silent, in black mantle and square bonnet, observes it all, and makes (internally) reflections on venerable institutions and “zeal.”

In the course of the sittings several other questions came on that were not without irony. Chief amongst these were the decay of the monastic orders and the growth of infidelity and Protestantism. Some of the most powerful prelates in the Assembly, as well as many deputies of the second order, were Voltairean in opinion and less than Voltairean in practice. All joined in the appeals to King and Pope to reform or suppress the corrupt and decaying monastic bodies, to stem the flood of philosophic literature, and to arrest the growth of Protestantism. They were honest at least in their attack on monasticism. It was one of the ideas of the philosophers, and was rapidly spreading amongst the people. Hardly a day passed now without an attack on them, and Talleyrand says that not a pen was lifted in their defence during the twenty years preceding the Revolution. At the States-General in 1789 one peasant deputy arrived with instructions to work for the suppression of pheasants, rabbits, and monks. Besides the usual struggle to disavow the feudal obligations, which the Court lawyers were constantly trying to fix on the clergy, the other matters discussed were mainly disciplinary.

Such was Talleyrand’s initiation to the inner life of the Church. Those who regret that, when he found himself forced even involuntarily into the ecclesiastical career, he did not endeavour to take a religious and self-sacrificing view of it, will do well to ponder these spectacles. Talleyrand’s course was natural. He used the influence of the president, who had a strong liking for him, to enter the gayer group of prelates. Dillon and de Brienne opened a few more of the Parisian salons to him. In the course of the sittings he had been made “promoteur” (a kind of sub-secretary, usually given a fair gratuity at the close), and was appointed to an unimportant committee on the voting counters and a very important one on religion and jurisdiction. He claims that he won some distinction in this Assembly, and was already marked for the high position of Agent-General of the Clergy. In September (1775—or eighteen months after Mme. du Barry has quitted the scene) we find a notice in the Gazette that he has been appointed abbé commendataire of the abbey of St. Denis at Rheims, which brought him an income of 18,000 livres a year. The diplomatic career thus began. The Pope confirmed the election of the sub-deacon abbé, and the prior took possession in Talleyrand’s name in December. As Chamfort put it, the ecclesiastical bachelor naturally looked to a wedding with some rich abbey to pay his debts. Bishops, Pope, and King acquiesced in the system without a murmur. All the bishops had sinecures of the sort, and the Court contrived to keep a few vacant at times and pocket the revenues. Talleyrand had not voluntarily entered the ecclesiastical world, and he was determined to make it serve his own ideal as far as possible. But one of his first acts was to pay off the debt his parents still owed to the Collège d’Harcourt.

Before going to Rheims he had applied for admission into the Society of the Sorbonne and been accepted (after formal proof of his moral and intellectual qualities). He took up residence there after the close of the Assembly. With his abbatial income (more than £700 a year) and the prospect of scraps of political and administrative work, he could have at once begun an independent residence in Paris. But that would have left him in the ambiguous position of a cleric and celibate, cut off from the higher clerical distinctions and possibilities. He must now complete his ecclesiastical education in the usual way, and proceed by way of the Agency-General (to come in 1780) to the episcopate.

However, the Sorbonne had not an intimidating repute for austerity. The Abbé Morellet, who had lived there with Turgot and de Brienne, describes in his memoirs the condition of the Sorbonne, and the details of what we may call its “fellowships,” in the eighteenth century. Its library supplied him with Locke, Bayle, and Clarke, as well as with Bellarmine and Aquinas. He read Voltaire, and associated with Diderot and d’Alembert. Theological studies of the old type were pretty well out of fashion. His companions were very generally imbued with the ideas of the philosophers. This relaxation of the older discipline continued down to the Revolution, and Talleyrand did not find residence there irksome. He stayed there two years, wrote the customary theses, and took a licentiate in theology on March 2nd, 1778. He never tried for the doctorate. But we may well believe that, as he says, he was “taken up with quite other things than theology.” The success of 1775 had stimulated him, and he spent many an hour in the darkened chapel before the tomb of Richelieu. He hints, too, that pleasure was his chief preoccupation, though this is limited by a later statement that he was unable to look up young Choiseul and find secular friends until he had left the Sorbonne. About the beginning of 1778 he completed his theological training and plunged in the gaieties of Parisian life.8

So much has been written on the social life of the wealthy and noble classes in France on the eve of the Revolution, that I need say little more than that the Abbé de Périgord, as he was now commonly styled, was found in every brilliant salon and circle at Paris during the next ten years. “You do not know what it is to live,” he would say indulgently to the new generation in their restored gaiety after 1815. In some few respects the pace of life had been moderated since the days of Louis XIV, but in others it had increased. There were no longer Pompadours and Du Barrys at Versailles, but the King’s propriety was less noticeable than his vulgarity9—courtiers telling daily of his prodigious breakfasts and dinners and indigestions, his antics when they were putting him to bed, and so on—and was quite undone by his weakness. The cynical memoirs of Lauzun show how little change there was in the character of the Court. The imprudence and frivolity of the beautiful young Queen, leaving Versailles to mix with the masked crowd at the Opera when the King had gone to bed (and being locked out by her tactless consort at six in the morning), or gambling heavily with her ladies until day-break, or giving far too substantial ground for charges of gallantry, encouraged the rising generation of nobles in their giddy dance in the crater of a rumbling volcano. She was largely responsible for the passion for heavy gambling that broke out. At Marly her ladies had to change their dresses after playing—soiled with the masses of gold wrung from an almost bankrupt country. A vulgar American adventurer could get the entrée of Versailles by letting it be known that he had a large sum of money to lose; he