Talleyrand

ion. A few youths were touched by the better influences of their surroundings, and nobly turned to the great models of Bossuet and Fénélon. A large number drifted impatiently through the s

rd, La Besnardière. It might have been predicted at an early stage that Talleyrand would fall in the third class. Then the peculiarly painful circumstances of his exclusion from the more natural career, which he so much desired, would make him independent, self-centred, calculating, lightly cynical. Add a reasoned

a spring presage so stormy an autumn, so dire a winter." No doubt there were statesmen present who tried to look up the darkening avenue, and wondered how the honest young king and his beautiful queen would meet the dangers that were gathering over the impoverished country. To Sub-Deacon Talleyrand4 the spectacle must have held another element of tragedy. At the time it probably only afforded him a tantalising vision of the gay world from which they would exclude him. Such prestige as the priest had, with his golden cope and sacramental oil and theatrical asceticism, was the last kind he would think of seeking. No doubt he w

become abbé until more than a year later, and was not ordained priest until much later still. M. de Lacombe has patiently traced his early movements in the ecclesiastical records at Rheims and Paris, and we are able to set aside most of the legends of his precocious gaiety. However, he had already begun to climb the ladder of ecclesiastical preferment. In January he had been made (while yet in minor orders) chaplain of the lady-chapel in the parish church at Rheims. He then received the sub-deaconate, and immediately after the coronation he was chosen by the clergy of Rheims to represent them at the General A

gedy-would continue. In the convent of the Grands-Augustins the thirty-two prelates, in rich surplices, sit in their thirty-two fauteuils; behind each prelate sits, on a "chair with a back," the corresponding delegate of the lower clergy in black mantle and square bonnet. The first great question is: How much is the King going to ask of us? For years jurists and politicians, and latterly philosophers, had murmured at the exemption of the clergy from taxation. The Church had only retained its privilege by paying a few millions at each assembly in

s," and are "exhausted" with gratuitous gifts. [The Church has an income of 150,000,000 livres a year.] Cardinal de la Roche-Aymon (with one religious sinecure alone worth 130,000 a year) nods acquiescence. Archbishop Dillon (160,000 a year and odd sinecures), Archbishop de Brienne (only 90,000 as yet-he is not yet Prime Minister), Archbishop de la Rochefoucauld (100,000), and the other prelates agree. Hardly a delegate but is abbé commendataire of some place or other. The abbacy of St. Bernard's historic monastery, where the monks once ate the leaves of the forest, is worth

d 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 wa

ty 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 ab

is 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

d 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 ot

kness. 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

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s an Order of Perseverance, with statutes by Mme. de Genlis, meetings in a gorgeous tent in Lauzun's garden, and costumes of white and grey and silver; in this edifying company the initiate had to answer a riddle, reply to a "moral question," make a speech in eulogy of some virtue, and-vow to redress injustice and succour the poor and distressed! Clotho and Lachesis must have smiled for once. There were rival Orders of Patience and Felicity and what not. Then Anglo-mania crept into their idle brains, and long evenings were spent in discussing the excellence of popular representation over tea and bread and butter, and the geometric

ile hovering about the mouth, and a fine crop of long, wavy hair framing the attractive face. He had taken a small house in the district of Bellechasse (near the Invalides), collected an excellent library of good books in good bindings, and at once renewed his acquaintance with Choiseul, Count Louis de Narbonne, and the Abbé

ess (the infant) in the house men could enter the enclosure; and, says Talleyrand, in one of his caustic moments, she "always yielded at once so as to avoid the scandal of coquetry." Heavy gambling went on under the Addisonian maxim. One youth lost 13,000 louis there. Talleyrand was a very frequent visitor, and an assiduous observer. "When you see much of men," said his cynical friend, Chamfort, "your heart must break or bronze." Talleyrand was not afflicted with a tender heart. His own house at Bellechasse soon became the centre of a brilliant circle of talkers. Though he rarely went to bed before three or four he was up early, and was joined by his friends over a cup of chocolate. He had a peculiarity in the heart-beat, to which he attributed his power of dispensing with sleep. He ate little-a cup of chocolate or a biscuit and glass of Madeira during the day, and a choice dinner in the evening. But his wine, his coffee, and his cook were carefully chosen, his toilet elaborately neat. One of the most cultured groups in the city used to gather at his house in the morning. Choiseul was the best of the group, and it is gratifying to find Talleyrand speaking of him in the later days with real affection. He was an animated talker and a good scholar, but he departed presently for the Embassy at Constantinople. Few of the others are spared in the terrible memoirs. He might have said with Chamfort, if he had deigned to borrow a phrase: "I have friends who love me, friends who don't care a pin about me, and friends who detest me." But their daily talks were one of the events of

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g him respect, or at least neutrality, "his vices knew no bounds but the limit of his imagination and that of those about him." Those about him had not infertile imaginations. Talleyrand was taken by Archbishops Dillon, de Brienne, and Cicé, to the house of Mme. de Montesson (secretly married to the Duc d'Orléans), and was granted a seat in the box reserved for "more or less dissipated clerics" (his own phrase) in the private opera-house where Madame and the Duke and other noble amateurs performed. He found her house "at the furthest limit of decency, but very pleasant." It is the only place at which he speaks of meeting his spiritual leaders. Loménie de Brienne had been proposed to the King for the archbishopric of Paris. "But surely," said Louis, "the archbishop of Paris should be a man who believes in God." It did not seem to matter a

t, at the Louvre. Governor Morris, the American Envoy, affirms that he found Talleyrand helping to give her a foot-bath there one morning. Her son, bo

ine with the Queen at Mme. de Polignac's, and went to "learned and tiresome concerts

done one wrong thing in my life." "When will it be over?" asked Talleyrand. "Sieyès is deep," said another to him. "You mean hollow," he at once replied. A lady once asked him, in a period of difficulty, how his affairs were going. One version has it that she asked how his legs were. "As you see, madame," he suavely answered. The lady squinted. His liberal ideas were, of course, an advantage. "He dresses like a fop, thinks like a deist, and preaches like an angel," said someone; though we have no trace whatever of his ever delivering sermons. But it was the age of the phi

us worker, and must have been an industrious student before that time. But he tasted, at least, every part of the life of Paris in those ten years at Bellechasse. I do not mean that he devoured all that it offered. He was an essentially temperate and refined man. He played for heavy stakes, as most people did; there were some 4,000 gambling houses at Paris when the Revolution began, to say nothing of salons, from that of the Queen at Marly downwards. But this is the only irregularity he admits; though, of course, the "Memoirs" are not "Confessions." The Baron de Vars has compiled a work on Les femmes de Talleyrand. Th