In this municipal council, considerable influence still existed; nor did it want various means for exercising that influence over the middle classes of the capital; so that a man of resolution and tact could have made it one of the most useful instruments for restoring the royal authority and consolidating it on new foundations.
It seems not unlikely, indeed, that M. de Talleyrand had the design of making it popular as the organ of good advice to the King, and of making the King popular by engaging him to listen to this advice, since we find that it drew up an address to him on the 18th April (about a fortnight after Mirabeau’s death), urging him to put aside from his councils those whom the nation distrusted, and to confide frankly in the men who were yet popular: whilst there is reason to believe, as I shall by-and-by have occasion to show, that M. de Talleyrand entered about this time into secret negotiations with the King, or, at least, offered him, through M. de Laporte, his best assistance.
But Louis XVI. was more likely to trust a bold and passionate man like Mirabeau, whom, notwithstanding his birth, he looked upon—considering the situation in which the Revolution had found him—as an adventurer who had been almost naturally his opponent, until he had purchased his support, rather than a man like M. de Talleyrand; a philosopher, a wit, who might be said to have been bred a courtier; and, on the other hand, M. de Talleyrand himself was too cautious to commit himself boldly and entirely to the daring and doubtful schemes which Mirabeau had prepared, until he saw a tolerable chance of their being successful.
Other circumstances, moreover, occurred at this time, which could not but have an unfavourable influence as to the establishment of any serious concert between the scrupulous and mistrustful monarch, and the chess-playing, constitutional bishop.
VII.
When M. de Talleyrand rejected the archbishopric of Paris, it was clear that he expected nothing further from the church; and he no doubt from that moment conceived the idea of freeing himself from its trammels on the first decent opportunity: nor did he long wait for this opportunity, for, on the 26th of April, one day after his consecration of the Curé Expelles, the newly-elected Bishop of Finisterre, arrived a brief thus announced in the Moniteur of the 1st of May, 1791:
“Le bref du Pape est arrivé jeudi dernier. De Talleyrand-Périgord, ancien évêque d’Autun, y est suspendu de toutes fonctions et excommunié, après quarante jours s’il ne revient pas a résipiscence.”[23]
The moment had now come for that decisive measure which the unwilling ecclesiastic had for some time contemplated; for he had too much tact to think of continuing his clerical office under the interdiction of the head of his church, and was by no means prepared to abandon his political career, and to reconcile himself with Rome, on the condition of separating himself from wealth and ambition. But one alternative remained—that of abandoning the profession into which he had been forced to enter. This he did at once, and without hesitation; appearing in the world henceforth (though sometimes styled in public documents the Abbé de Périgord, or the ancien évêque d’Autun) under the plain designation of M. de Talleyrand, a designation which I have already frequently applied to him, and by which, though he was destined to be raised to far higher titles, he has by universal consent descended to posterity. The act was a bold one; but, like most bold acts in difficult circumstances, it was not (I speak of it as a matter of worldly calculation) an imprudent one: for it released an indifferent priest from a position which he could only fill with decency by a constant hypocrisy, for which he was too indolent; and it delivered up an able statesman to a career for which, by the nature of his talents, he was peculiarly fitted. Neither was M. de Talleyrand’s withdrawal from the church so remarkable a fact at that moment as it would have been at any other; for France, and even Europe, were then overrun by French ex-ecclesiastics of all grades, who were prohibited from assuming their rank and unable to fulfil their duties, and who, in many cases, were obliged to conceal their real calling under that from which they earned a daily subsistence.
Nevertheless, the Bishop of Autun’s particular case excited and merited attention. It had been as an organ and representative of the French church, that this prelate had contributed in no slight degree to alienate its property and change its constitution; and now, his brethren in the French clergy being what he had made them, he voluntarily threw their habit from his shoulders and renounced all participation in their fate.
It might, it is true, be urged that none had lost more by the destruction of the ancient church and its institutions than himself, that he had originally become a priest against his inclinations, and that he was compelled to decide either against his convictions as a citizen or against his obligations as a churchman. Still, this desertion from his order by one who had been so conspicuous a member of it, was undoubtedly a scandal, and though the world usually pardons those whom it has an interest to forgive, and though M. de Talleyrand, if he erred, had the consolation of living to see his errors forgiven or overlooked by many very rigid Catholics, who enjoyed his society, by many very pious princes, who wanted his services, and even by the Pope himself, when his holiness was in a situation to fear his enmity and require his goodwill—he himself never felt entirely at his ease as to his early profession, and was so sensitive on the subject that the surest way to offend him was to allude to it. I was told by a lady, long intimate with M. de Talleyrand, that even the mention of the word “lawn” annoyed him.