Anne Robert Jacques was his third son, and a timid, shy little creature. His mother, who, en vraie Parisienne, thought everything of appearance and manners, worried him on the subject of his clumsiness and stupidity, which naturally made the child self-conscious and increased the faults fourfold. When visitors arrived to flatter Madame by admiring her children, Anne Robert hid under the sofa or the table; and when he was removed from his retreat, could produce no company manners at all. No wonder the mother never even suspected the strong intellect and the wonderful character that so much awkwardness concealed.
Anne Robert’s birth was contemporaneous with Voltaire’s visit to England, and took place on May 10, 1727. The child had already two brothers. The eldest was bound, after the foolish custom of the day, to follow his father’s profession; the second brother must go into the army; and for Anne Robert there was nothing left but the Church.
He followed Voltaire and Helvétius at the school of Louis-le-Grand, and when sufficiently advanced, moved on to the College of Plessis. As a schoolboy his pocket-money disappeared with the usual rapidity, but not in the usual way. This shy little student gave it to his poorer companions, to buy books. From the time he was sixteen—that is in 1743—until 1750, he was a divinity student. At Saint-Sulpice, whither he went in 1748 on leaving Plessis, he took his degree as a Theological Bachelor, and from there entered the Sorbonne.
The Sorbonne, which was swept away by the Revolution, was a very ancient Theological College and in some respects not unlike an English university. Young Turgot found there Morellet and Loménie de Brienne, besides a certain Abbé de Cicé, to whom in 1749 he addressed one of the first of his writings, a ‘Letter on Paper Money.’
In 1749, Turgot was made Prior of the Sorbonne, in which rôle he had to deliver two Latin lectures, choosing for his themes, ‘The Advantages of Christianity,’ and ‘The Advance of the Mind of Man.’ All the time he was reading, thinking, observing on his own account, studying especially Locke, Bayle, Clarke, and Voltaire. A priest he soon knew he could not be. To be sure, the fact that his friend Loménie de Brienne is a sceptic will not prevent him becoming a cardinal and Archbishop of Toulouse; he would have been Archbishop of Paris had his Majesty not been so painfully particular as to demand that the Primate of the capital should at least believe in a God. But Turgot was of other metal and was not minded to live a lie. All his friends begged him to keep to the lucrative career assigned him, surely, by Providence! ‘You will be a bishop,’ says Cicé comfortably, ‘and then you can be a statesman at your leisure.’
The argument was very seductive; but this student was in every respect unlike other students, with a character breathing a higher and finer air than theirs. Morellet records, not without the suspicion of a sneer, that from their coarse boyish jokes he shrank as one shrinks from a blow. Even Condorcet, himself so pure in life, laughed at people wasting time in quenching the desires of the flesh; but Turgot vindicated purity as well as practised it, and reached a level of principle, as of conduct, which in the eighteenth century was unfortunately almost unique.
His father, wiser than most parents in like circumstances, countenanced his objections to the priesthood. He had already studied law, as well as theology. In 1750 he left the Sorbonne, and Loménie gave a farewell dinner in his rooms, with Turgot and Morellet of the party, and the light-hearted guests planned a game of tennis behind the church of the Sorbonne for the year 1800.
The year 1800! Before then the Sorbonne itself had perished with Church, monarchy, and nobility; shallow Brienne, having done mighty mischief, had poisoned himself in the château his ill-earned wealth had been gained to restore; Morellet was writing revolutionary pamphlets; and Turgot was dead.
In 1752, two years after he left the Sorbonne, Anne Robert obtained the legal post of Deputy Counsellor of the Procurator-General, and a year later was made Master of Requests.
One must picture him at this time as a tall, broad-shouldered, rather handsome man, with that old boyish constraint in his manner, and that strict high-mindedness which his own generation could not be expected to find attractive. Add to these qualities that he was not in the least carried away by dreams and visions, as were nearly all his friends, that even then he saw the world as it was, and meant to do with it what he could—that, though in lofty aim he may have been an idealist, he never fell into the idealist’s fault of believing that, because there is everything to do, he must do everything, or nothing. Just, reasonable, practical—what a wholesome contrast to your visionary Rousseaus, ay, and to your impulsive Voltaires! He was not a brilliant person, this; it is said that he was slow in everything he undertook. Nor had he given over the vigour of his youth and the strength of his understanding to any one party. He was studying them all.