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 the measure of his acquiescence, and learned the essential qualities of a diplomatist. In later years he saw advantages in the training. It was well to have been thus “dipped in the waters of the Styx.” He never spoke or wrote a harsh word of his parents,[2] or of Saint Sulpice, or of the Church. “Well, God keep his soul, but I like him,” said Pius VII of Talleyrand, after his first struggle with Napoleon.