[1] Louis Blanc (in his _Histoire de la Révolution_, viii. 35) has misunderstood this article. He takes the unfaithful wife and illegitimate son to mean Marie Antoinette and the Dauphin. A note in the original text has escaped his observation; it is to the effect that the "founders of the three greatest religions were bastards."
[2] Laurent, _Histoire du droit des gens_, tome xiv.; Carlyle, _History of the French Revolution_, i.-iii.; Louis Blanc, _Histoire de la révolution française_, i.-xii.; Chateaubriand, _Mémoires d'outre-tombe_, i., ii.
One night in the month of October 1801 the gates of Paris were secretly opened to admit a closed carriage with a military escort. What was concealed in that carnage? Was it a criminal? Was it contraband ware? There sat in it an old priest, Caprara by name, the Pope's envoy to General Bonaparte; and the contraband article thus smuggled into Paris in the darkness was the Concordat, the compact with Rome which re-established the Christian religion in France. It was considered rash to allow a priest coming on such an errand to make his entrance in daylight; the First Consul, with his usual sagacity and forethought, had arranged that he should arrive at night. It was not violence that was feared, only laughter. "They dared not," says Thiers, "put such temptation in the way of the mirth-loving population of Paris."[1]
The same difficulty recurred in April 1802, when, after countless attempts to come to an agreement, during the course of which it often seemed as if the negotiations were on the point of being finally broken off, things were so far settled that Napoleon could accord an official reception to the Cardinal-Legate. Ecclesiastical etiquette prescribes that a gold crucifix shall be borne in front of a papal legate, and the Cardinal demanded that on his way to the reception at the Tuileries this should be done by a mounted officer in a red uniform. On this occasion also the Government, as Thiers tells us, was afraid of the effect of such a spectacle on the population of Paris. A compromise was come to; it was agreed to do with the crucifix what had been done with the Cardinal himself six months previously, namely, drive it in a closed carriage.