This episode belongs to his eighteenth year. It is the only authentic detail we have about his life after his stay at Rheims in 1769 until 1774. In that year we find him (in the records consulted by M. de Lacombe) competing for what we should call a fellowship at the Sorbonne. The thesis he sustained there on September 22nd was very edifying and successful. “What science is most fitted for the lips of the priest?” was the question he undertook to answer, and the published discourse was piously dedicated to the Blessed Virgin. It was his first essay in diplomacy. For priestly ideals he cared not a tittle. But the world seemed to make it a curious condition of success to do this sort of thing, a polite recognition of the particular ante-chamber to public life in which you found yourself. The maxims of Richelieu and De Retz had taken root. The conditions of advancement were repugnant to him, but they were not chosen by him. As a young man of culture in a philosophic age, he could not be expected to take religion seriously. He had read much more of Hume and Locke, of Montaigne and Voltaire, than of Suarez. He became a bachelor of theology, and drew near to the end of his dreary residence in the seminary. CHAPTER II THE ABBÉ MALGRÉ LUI It will hardly be thought that up to this point there is any mystery about the person of Talleyrand. Many types of character were produced by this enforcement of the ecclesiastical profession. A few youths were touched by the better influences of their surroundings, and nobly turned to the great models of Bossuet and Fénélon. A large number drifted impatiently through the seminary, enlivened it with frequent dips into the stream of Parisian life, and emerged as the philosophic abbés and bishops we shall meet presently, ecclesiastical only in title and purse. Many worked silently and steadily through the years of study with a more or less clear political ideal always in mind, using the general education of the priest and the specific training of a systematised theology for their ulterior purposes. Such were Sieyès, Talleyrand, Fouché, Louis, Montesquiou, Daunou, Reinhard, La Besnardière. It might have been predicted at an early stage that Talleyrand would fall in the third class. Then the peculiarly painful circumstances of his exclusion from the more natural career, which he so much desired, would make him independent, self-centred, calculating, lightly cynical. Add a reasoned disbelief in religious teaching (though it is impossible to say when this began), and we can surely understand Talleyrand in his twentieth year, gravely discussing priestly qualities from the Sorbonne pulpit, while his heart is at Versailles. But we are a long way advanced in the work of interpreting our “Sphinx.”