conscientious and high-minded prelate, who suffered much in after years from the conduct of his favourite nephew. He tried to reconcile the boy with his profession. The Archbishop of Rheims, the Count de la Roche-Aymon, was a prelate of dignity and intellect, and an imposing figure at archi-episcopal functions. With his episcopal income and the Abbey of SaintGermain-aux-Près (a total annual income of 180,000 livres), besides private means, he was not one of the wealthiest prelates, but his see was of great importance, and his splendour would have dazzled a youth with any disposition to the clerical career. But the encouragement of the two prelates and all the glory of their functions were quite lost on young Talleyrand. He says in his memoirs that all this prestige did not seem to him "worth the sacrifice of his sincerity." That is obviously an after-thought. It was an instinctive consciousness of his unfitness for the celibate state and for religious ministry that moved him. Madame de Genlis saw him at Sillery with his uncle, and noticed the pale, silent boy, with the observant eyes, in soutane and skull cap. He probably noticed Madame de Genlis in return, if he did not hear something about that charming compound of philosophic virtue and plebeian vice. A few such acquaintances and a few small ecclesiastical dignities were all he ever acquired at Rheims.

He says that his uncle put in his way the lives of Richelieu and Ximenes and Hincmar, and the memoirs of Retz, to show that the ecclesiastical life had

possibilities. He would hardly need assistance in discovering those helpful books. Now that the Church must be embraced he formed his own view of it. It should serve as a back-door to the pleasant world from which they would exclude him. He would rejoin young Choiseul and Madame de Genlis by-and-by. It is a rather curious commentary on his training at this time that a shrewed adventuress, who saw a good deal of him under the Directorate, described him as a mixture of Richelieu's firmness, Mazarin's finesse, de Retz's versatility, and a little of de Rohan's gallantry. He may have heard, too, of that questionable ancestor of his in the fourteenth century, the Cardinal Hélie de Périgord, in whose titular Church at Rome an inscription recorded that "he was weak in religion but assiduous in worldly things." Cardinal Hélie, a friend of Petrarch, had become an influential politician, had made a large fortune in commerce, and had spent it pleasantly in the patronage of art and luxury.

These ideas would take shape in time, as he resigned himself to the ecclesiastical condition. In the circumstances such a resignation could only take one form. Month by month the restless youth, with the whole adventurous history of the Périgords in his veins, would contrast the dulness of his surroundings with the dream of his boyhood. Had there been a profound and general religious sentiment in the place, his earlier vision might have been obliterated; but Voltaireanism was in even the atmosphere of Saint Sulpice. There were good

and sincere priests in the French Church then, as ever, but some of its most prominent representatives were known sceptics, and Hume and Voltaire were read in the seminaries. In through the windows of his prison, too, would come the laughter of Paris, the sound of the bugle, the flash of the passing nobility. A youth devoid of any natural religious disposition, with a horror of ascetic plainness and heavy religious formalism, with a quick, inborn faculty of irony, with a sensuous element just beginning to stir in his blood, and a temperamental craving for woman's society, could never serve the Church. The Church must serve him. He did not discuss his moods with anyone. To most of his companions he was morose and taciturn. To his superiors he was a problem. One of his school-fellows used to tell in later years* how on one occasion he was reading in the refectory, and he came to a passage : "And when the Chateau Tropette." The superior corrected him, and said "Trompette." Talleyrand coolly repeated the passage, and was again corrected. He read it a third time, and quickly ran on before the

*I have already ignored scores of stories about Talleyrand's youth. The biographer has to plunge beneath a mass of them to reach his true subject. A discharged secretary of his, who could imitate his signature, flooded Paris and London with fabricated letters and anecdotes, and he had many rivals in the business. Writers like Bastide, Pichot, Villemarest, Michaud, Stewartson, Touchard-Lafosse, and even SainteBeuve, readily admit these, and some of the best biographies contain a few that are inconsistent with known facts. Such are the stories of his chalking Voltairean verses on his uncle's garden wall, and of (in the following year) scaling the walls of Saint Sulpice by night, seducing a whole family, and being imprisoned in the Bastille. The dates or other features betray these apocryphal legends.

superior could speak, "the Chateau Tropette, which the ignorant have hitherto called the Chateau Trompette." We can well imagine that a discreet contempt of authority and disdain of zeal were growing in him.

After a time he found the inevitable (and not unusual) means to enliven the dulness of Saint Sulpice. He was leaving the church one rainy morning when he noticed a pretty girl without an umbrella. He offered a share of his, escorted her home, and they saw each other nearly every day for a long time. They were both rebels. She had been sent on the stage against her wish. This is the only irregularity Talleyrand confesses to at that time, and there is no serious ground for entertaining the wild stories of gambling and liaisons. The soundness of them may be judged from the circumstance that they suppose his father to have died some time before (alleging that an uncle shuts him in the Bastille), whereas the father lived for seventeen years afterwards. The seminary authorities were not unwilling to purchase a brighter disposition in their pupil at the price. Talleyrand hints, too, that their liberality had some regard for his connections and prospects.

This episode belongs to his eighteenth year. It is the only authentic detail we have about his life after his stay at Rheims in 1769 until 1774. In that year we find him (in the records consulted by M. de Lacombe) competing for what we should call a fellowship at the Sorbonne. The thesis he sustained there on September 22nd was very edifying and successful. "What science

is most fitted for the lips of the priest?" was the uestion he undertook to answer, and the published iscourse was piously dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. t was his first essay in diplomacy. (For priestly ideals

e cared not a tittle. But the world seemed to make it curious condition of success to do this sort of thing, a polite recognition of the particular ante-chamber to public life in which you found yourself. The maxims of Richelieu and De Retz had taken root. The conditions of advancement were repugnant to him, but they were not chosen by him. As a young man of culture in a philosophic age, he could not be expected to take religion seriously. He had read much more of Hume and Locke, of Montaigne and Voltaire, than of Suarez. He became a bachelor of theology, and drew near to the end of his dreary residence in the seminary.