in France of that diplomatic subtlety and finesse which Richelieu and the Pere Joseph developed between them. He had in mind that which divines learn on the benches of the schools, the extreme subdivision of thought, the habit of threshing out all the contents of a proposition, the dialectics verging on hair-splitting and sophistry, inherited from long ages that were undeterred by observation ; not the advantages of a system with imposing traditions, fixed maxims, and a constant policy, whose agents are never taken by surprise and know the uses of time. He was thinking of the priesthood negotiating more than governing. He had seen in his own vicinity, in his own person, things more memorable than the diplomatic art of Cardinal du Bellay and Cardinal de Bernis. The Revolution had been started by one priest ; the Republic had been proposed by another. Three out of eight in the Constitutional Committee were ecclesiastics. The Constitution of the year III., as well as that of the year VIII., were chiefly devised by divines. The four ministers who, at the Restoration, inaugurated parliamentary government belonged to the clergy.
His own studies were principally profane. The first book he mentions is the Memoirs of Cardinal de Retz, a man often compared to him in point of character and ability. He tells us that he read political writers and historians ; but when he puts Polignac next to d'Ossat among negotiators, he betrays the limits of his knowledge in that sort of literature. He had read Montesquieu, and, like all the best minds of that age, he was influenced by the Esprit des Lois. He pays Machiavelli the tribute of intelligent imitation, and fortifies his legitimacy by the authority of a grim passage from The Prince. He collected a choice library ; but he was too much a man of the world to resign himself to study and the dominion of silent masters. Books, he says, have enlightened him ; he has never allowed them to govern him. He describes how much he owed to conversation in chosen society and how he picked the brains of specialists.
In old age Talleyrand used to say that life had never
