After the religious wars there were neither churches nor presbyteries, and therefore there were thousands of villages where there were no priests, but it is to be doubted whether such villages were more pitiable than those in which by their daily conduct the priests constantly provoked the people to despise the earthly representative of God. The abandoned villages were not plunged in thicker moral and religious darkness, or in grosser or more abominable superstition, than that into which the ignoble pastors led their flocks. In one half of the total number of the provinces of France, the work that the first missionaries to the Gauls had accomplished had all to be begun again. In the world of the aristocracy the condition of Catholicism was little better. When Vincent de Paul--by a mischance which was not to be the only one in his career--was appointed Almoner to Queen Marguerite, first wife of Henry IV., he was overwhelmed by what he saw and heard. The Court was two thirds pagan.[98] A loose and reckless line of thought, a moral libertinage, was considered a mark of elegance, and that opinion obtained until the seventeenth century. The _jeunesse dorée_, the "gilded youths" of the day, imitated the atheists and gloried in manifesting their contempt for the "superstitions of religion." They repeated after Vanini that "man ought to obey the natural law," that "vice and virtue should be classed as products of climate, of temperament, and of alimentation," that "children born with feeble intellects are best fitted to develop into good Christians." Among the higher classes, piety was not entirely extinct; that was proven in the days of the triumphant Renaissance, when the Catholicism of Bossuet and of Bourdaloue flamed with all the strength of a newly kindled fire from the dying embers of the old religion. But the belief in God and in the things of God was not to be avowed among people of intellect. In a certain elegant, frivolous, and corrupt world, impiety and wit marched hand in hand. A man was not absolutely perfect in tone and manners unless he seasoned his conversation with a grain of atheism.[99] Under Louis XIII. in the immediate neighbourhood of royalty the tone changed, because the King's bigotry kept close watch over the appearance of religion. Men knew that they could not air their smart affectation of skepticism with impunity when their chief not only openly professed and practised religion, but frowned upon those who did not. All felt that the only way to be popular at Court was to follow the example of the King, and all slipped their atheism up their sleeves and bowed the knee with grace and dexterity, pulling on long faces and praying as visibly as Louis himself. But many years passed before the practice of religion expressed the feelings of the heart. Richelieu[100] had several intimate friends who were openly confessed infidels, and proud of their infidelity. While they were intellectual