However, the Sorbonne had not an intimidating repute for austerity. The Abbé Morellet, who had lived there with Turgot and de Brienne, describes in his memoirs the condition of the Sorbonne, and the details of what we may call its “fellowships,” in the eighteenth century. Its library supplied him with Locke, Bayle, and Clarke, as well as with Bellarmine and Aquinas. He read Voltaire, and associated with Diderot and d’Alembert. Theological studies of the old 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 other things than theology.” The success of 1775 had stimulated him, and he spent many an hour in the darkened chapel before the tomb of Richelieu. He hints, too, that pleasure was his chief preoccupation, though this is limited by a later statement that he was unable to look up young Choiseul and find secular friends until he had left the Sorbonne. About the beginning of 1778 he completed his theological training and plunged in the gaieties of Parisian life.8
So much has been written on the social life of the wealthy and noble classes in France on the eve of the Revolution, that I need say little more than that the Abbé de Périgord, as he was now commonly styled, was found in every brilliant salon and circle at Paris during the next ten years. “You do not know what it is to live,” he would say indulgently to the new generation in their restored gaiety after 1815. In some few respects the pace of life had been moderated since the days of Louis XIV, but in others it had increased. There were no longer Pompadours and Du Barrys at Versailles, but the King’s propriety was less noticeable than his vulgarity9—courtiers telling daily of his prodigious breakfasts and dinners and indigestions, his antics when they were putting him to bed, and so on—and was quite undone by his weakness. 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 be known that he had a large sum of money to lose; he won in a short time 1,500,000 livres from his royal shearers. Another man won 1,800,000 livres in one evening. The thoughtless Count d’Artois, the King’s brother, bet the Queen 100,000 livres that he would build a palace in the Bois in six weeks; he won it—and the 900 men he had employed scattered over Paris with the story. Whoever could invent or import a new sensation was sure of the Queen’s support. Racing was introduced from England, and she flew to Sablons to lay bets on the horses of her favourite, the too notorious Lauzun. Then chariot races (some chariots costing ten thousand crowns) varied the programme; and a society was formed at Paris for the construction of a bull-ring. Grave parliamentary lawyers and financial ministers frowned, and were dismissed.
From an engraving.
TALLEYRAND
(A portrait taken in early life).
In dress, furniture and banquets the fashion was equally luxurious and criminal. The age of Henri Quatre took the fancy of the younger nobles, and they tried to revive the splendid costumes of that time, but the King interfered. Whole fortunes were spent on fantastic head-dresses. Ladies drove among the impoverished people and before bankrupt tradesmen with structures two or three feet high on their heads, landscapes, symbolic designs—the American Independence hat, the racing hat, the vaccination hat, and so on. Orders of chivalry were set up by this nobility that was squeezing the blood out of the veins of the peasantry. There was 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 geometrical gardens were Anglicised at great expense, and Gobelins tapestry gave place to wall-paper. And, in fine, we get a real novelty in the shape of Cagliostro with his toad that had received all the Sacraments, his innocent young girl, and his devils at command. Cardinal-Prince de Rohan, with the two-and-a-half millions a year and heavy debts, with the alb worth 100,000 livres, with the twenty-five valets de chambre and fourteen maitres d’hotel, had set him up in his palace at Paris; and dashing colonels and elderly countesses and philosophic abbés went to see Beelzebub in the flesh. And the Fourth Estate was coming rapidly to birth.
Into this giddy stream the Abbé de Périgord gladly plunged. He was in his twenty-fourth year, still pale of face, but with the familiar Talleyrand features fully developed: the quiet blue-grey eyes, so very observant, under bushy eye-brows, the nose pointed and slightly turned up, the lower lip protruding a little, a faint smile 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 de Périgord. They were collective owners of a stable of racers, and were the nucleus of a group of diners and talkers that nearly every ambitious woman must entertain. Talleyrand soon completed his education. He became a famous whist-player (his chief amusement through life), and added a good deal to his income at the tables.
He had in the Rue Saint-Dominique an interesting and useful neighbour in the Countess de Genlis. After a very romantic career she was then in charge of the children of the Duc de Chartres. In 1779 she had retired from the gaiety (and orgies) of the Palais Royal to train, on the best moral and philosophical principles, the twin daughters of the Duchess. The Convent of the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre at Bellechasse was a favourite spot for “retreats” amongst the wealthy Parisians, and a house was built in its grounds in which the retired countess could carry out her work. Over its street door—a grilled, very religious-looking door—was written, in gold characters, Addison’s excellent saying: “True happiness is of a retired nature and an enemy to pomp and noise.” Two of the nuns guarded the door, which was firmly closed at ten every night, and the key was taken into the convent. Inside, beyond the simple furniture (she had left her seven hundred pounds’ worth of mirrors in her salon at the Palais), all was calmly educative. Busts of great and good men, maps, historical tablets, &c., abounded. So Mme. de Genlis in her memoirs. She was just such a neighbour as Talleyrand would appreciate at that time. With the same ever-flowing pen she would write a most edifying book on moral education, a Jacobin speech for the Duke, and an erotic novel. Her moral writings testified, as E. de Goncourt says, to “the ease with which her imagination could find a substitute for experience.” All Paris descended on the model teacher’s dwelling in the Rue Saint-Dominique. There being a royal princess (the infant) in the house men could enter the enclosure; and, says Talleyrand, in one of his caustic