Nowhere did the revolutionary ploughshare cut deeper than among the clergy and the religious orders. Nearly forty monasteries and convents were suppressed in Paris, and strange scenes were those when the troops of monks and friars issued forth to secular life, some crying, "_Vive Jesus le Roi et la Revolution_," for the new ideas had penetrated even the cloister. The barbers' shops were invaded, and strange figures were seen smoking their pipes along the Boulevards. Some went to the wars; others, especially the Benedictines, appealed for teaching appointments; many, faithful to their vows, went forth to poverty, misery and death. The nuns and sisters gave more trouble, and the scenes that attended their expulsion and that of the non-juring clergy burned deep into the memories of the pious. "What do they take from me?" cried the _curé_ of St. Marguerite in his farewell sermon. "My cure? All that I have is yours, and it is you they despoil. My life? I am eighty-four years of age, and what of life remains to me is not worth the sacrifice of my principles." Descending the pulpit the venerable priest passed through a sobbing congregation to a garret in one of the Faubourgs. There were but few, however, who imitated the dignified protest of the _curé_ of St. Marguerite. Many a pulpit rang with fiery denunciations, which recalled the savage fanaticism of the league. Some of the younger clergy and a few of the bishops were on the side of the early Revolutionists. The Abbé Fouchet was the Peter the Hermit of the crusade for Liberty, and so popular were his sermons in Notre Dame that a seat there fetched twenty-four sous. But the corruption and apostasy of the hierarchy as a whole, and their betrayal of the people, had borne its acrid fruit of popular contempt and hostility, resulting in the monstrous profanation of Notre Dame and other churches of Paris by the fanatics of the worship of Nature and the puerile Deistic theatricalities of Robespierre's Feasts of the Supreme Being. Compromise became impossible and the Revolutionists found arrayed against them the most universal and the deepest of human sentiments, the strongest cementing force in civil life. Less than eight years after Robespierre's solemn comedy of the _Etre Suprème_ all the hierarchy of the old religion returned--sixty archbishops and bishops, and an army of priests. A gorgeous Easter Mass in Notre Dame celebrated the re-establishment of the Catholic faith by Napoleon, the heir of the Revolution.