LITMIR.BIZ

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He saw a broad country-side, where not a steeple or monument could catch his eye but he was told his ancestors had reared it. On Sundays he saw her courtiers carry her prayer-book in the red velvet bag, and he knelt on his chair near her prie-dieu, and felt the admiring glances of the peasantry. After mass he saw—he has described it all so tenderly in his memoirs—the sick and needy of the estate trail after them to the chateau, where the old lady sat in her velvet chair in the “dispensary,” and the huge pots of ointment (of which the recipes were kept in the family) were opened, and two Sisters of Charity interrogated the applicants, and the Princess cut up the lint and linen with her own hands, and directed her courtiers to deal out the syrups and ointments. He saw the old regime at its best.

      The four years that the boy spent at Chalais had a deep influence for good on him. The Princess loved him: she was almost the only one to awaken his finer feelings in those years of formation, and we shall find them, recalling those kindly days, long after the terrible ordeal that was to follow, in the blood-spattered streets of Paris and on the reeking battle-fields of Napoleon. As he grew up he must have wondered at times why, through those eight long years he never felt the kiss of a mother or heard the cheering voice of his distinguished father. Then he would learn of Paris and Versailles, and how the splendour of Chalais was only a distant reflection of the life that streamed out from the capital. At last he was to return to Paris, to see his parents, to ask by what path he was to enter into that life. He was eight years old, a sharp, observant, sensitive and ambitious boy.

      Then the trial began, and the de-formation of his better instincts. While his young mind was nervously tracing its large ambition a family-council was disposing of his body and soul, without a glance at anything but his foot. A valet met him at the coach-office at Paris and took him straight to school. Where were his parents? Where was Versailles? The little lips contracted. He found himself in the dull, stuffy atmosphere of one of the oldest schools in Paris, the Collège d’Harcourt (now the Lycée St. Louis). It lay just off the present Boulevard Michel, its grounds touching those of the Cordeliers. It was a recognised school for children of good families; in fact, his father left him to pay in later years for his own education. At dinner on the first day he sat next to a future ambassador, a nephew of the great Choiseul. He shared the room and tutor of a cousin. But the teachers were poor (except his teacher of philosophy), and were chiefly expert in the “Almanach de la Cour.” In the course of his four years there Talleyrand picked up a fair acquaintance with the subjects taught at the time—French history and letters, logic (greatly esteemed at Paris, and of very obvious influence on his papers afterwards), rhetoric, Latin, philosophy, and a little mathematics. He was industrious and an assiduous reader.

      Long afterwards his experience of the Collège d’Harcourt was to lend colour to his denunciation of pre-Revolutionary education. But the poorness of his intellectual training was the smallest sin committed against him in those days. The neglect of his character, his personality, was fatal. An affectionate interest on the part of his parents might have prepared him for the coming disappointment, but it was wholly denied. In his memoirs he speaks with a singular respect of them; at one time he even ventures to suggest that they probably kept away from him lest, in their great love, they should lose the courage to carry out the resolution to commit him to the Church! His father lived until 1788 and his mother until 1809, yet he never spent a week under the same roof with them. On Sundays one of the teachers would take him to dine with them, and after a formal hour or two his father would pat his head and tell him to “be good and obey Monsieur l’Abbé.” His finer qualities were irreparably neglected. His school-fellows were good comrades, but the eternal dulness of the place and the restraint of his parents depressed him. It was not an uncommon experience in this regard. You find much the same complaint about their school-days in the memoirs of most of his contemporaries. The particular difficulty in Talleyrand’s case was the absence of any encouraging words about the future. By this time he had begun to think about it. Gradually, he understood hints that it was not the fine halls of Versailles or the adventures of the camp, but the sombre world of the Church, to which he was destined. In his twelfth year, about the end of his college days, he caught the small-pox, and was hurried off to the house of a strange nurse in the Rue Saint-Jacques. Somehow he survived the deadly treatment usual at that time—great fires and hermetically-sealed windows—and escaped marking. But in his convalescence he pondered again on the absence of his mother.

      The time had now come for an open statement about his future. It seems probable that he was sent then, in 1766, to visit his uncle, who had just become coadjutor to the Archbishop of Rheims. It is likely enough that his parents would try to seduce him from military ambition by a sight of the archbishop-count’s brilliant ecclesiastical court, and Talleyrand affirms in his memoirs that he was taken from the college to Rheims. However, it was probably some time later that he spent a year with his uncle, as he talks of being in his fifteenth year. Mme. de Genlis says that she saw him at Rheims in his “eleventh or twelfth” year, but she describes him as wearing a soutane, so that she also probably refers to a later date. Whether or no he then visited Rheims, it is clear that in his twelfth or thirteenth year he was sent to Saint Sulpice, and shrank to find himself in the soutane.

      It is hardly necessary to recall that this was a common practice in the eighteenth century in France, and in many other times and places. Bossuet and Fénélon had protested religiously against the custom, but it continued to the full, almost without a single complaint, in Talleyrand’s day. The effect on the Church itself was disastrous. Scores of younger or illegitimate sons of the nobility were forced into it against their inclination, and they adopted within it the Voltairean scepticism and the looseness of morals which the Army or the Court would have sanctioned. Just at the crisis of its fortunes the Church found at its head such men as the Cardinal de Rohan (the patron of Cagliostro—in exile anent the famous necklace), Loménie de Brienne and Dillon. It had not spoken a syllable of protest when they were presented to it for ordination, for the sole purpose of securing the revenues, and neglecting the duties, of its rich abbeys and bishoprics. Loménie de Brienne, in fact, had deliberately chosen the Church as the best path for his ambition, and resigned the secular primogeniture. During the years of preparation for the Church he was designing the plan of his archi-episcopal chateau and dreaming of the political leadership of the country. Most of them, like Talleyrand, were put into the Church so as to relieve the strain on the king’s coffers at its expense. It had been decided, and was afterwards formally decreed, that no commission in the army should be given to any but a noble, and still the supply was excessive; though the King’s personal service cost forty million livres a year, and that of the Queen a further five millions. Then they turned to the Church, with its income of 150,000,000 livres a year, as a field for younger sons. Wealthy bishoprics were appropriated to the nobility, and wealthy abbeys—the income of the Abbot of Saint Germain at Paris was 130,000 a year—were handed over to them as abbés commendataires, which might be translated “absentee landlords.”

      But I will return presently to the character of the clergy on the eve of the Revolution. Though wealth and prestige and political power were to be had in the clerical profession, the young Talleyrand bitterly resented his situation. By a healthy instinct he felt that, as later experience showed, he was totally unfitted for the Church. Hence he quickly developed a habit of silent and cynical observation, of disregard for authority and conventional ideals, and of unhealthy isolation and self-possession. Many years afterwards an emigrant bishop, who had been a schoolfellow of his at Saint Sulpice, recalled how he used to say to his one or two close friends: “They want to make a priest of me, but they will have an unpleasant time of it.” He himself says that he hardly spoke a word during the first three years at the seminary. His recreation hours were spent in its splendid library, where he sought especially the lives of statesmen “and moralists,” works of travel and adventure, and books that described all kinds of violent movements and upheavals in Nature and the social order. He had not the temperament of a revolutionary; his experience and reading led rather to a complete atrophy of his power of devotion to an idea or an institution. In his theology he would read how the service of religion demanded perfect ministers—“victims without blemish,” in the words of the Church; yet his superiors blandly accepted those who were rejected by army or Court. He saw injustice and hypocrisy on every side, and concluded that loyalty and devotion were masks. So, as time went on, he retreated more and more within himself, made his own interest

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