Towards the end of 1800, Paris had a new fact to proceed on in its cafés. The Vatican had sent Mgr. Spina, the Papal Nuncio at Florence, to confer with Talleyrand and Napoleon. The sagacious priest did not flaunt his purple, merely announcing that the Archbishop of Corinth had come to treat with Napoleon on matters concerning the administration of Rome. But the religious controversy had revived in France, and the appearance of a papal envoy fanned the flame. The relaxation of the laws had introduced a large number of the emigrant clergy, and these contended everywhere with the Constitutionalists for the care of souls and of presbyteries. The confusion was increased by the Theophilanthropists, who claimed the sacred edifices of the country in the superior name of virtue, and asked the people to bow to their august abstractions. After a mass they would decorate Catholic altars with flowers in honour of morality, and they showed no lack of courage in defending their fair ideals. Philosophic deists and quick-witted atheists smiled on the confusion. But all eyes were now centred on the pale and portly prelate who sat in long conference with the ex-bishop at the Foreign Office. Mgr. Spina had been generally directed to avoid the excommunicated apostates, but to moderate the rigour of the Canon Law when “urbanity” demanded. “Urbanity” clearly involved amiable relations with Talleyrand, and the suave, serious tone of the diplomatist at once disarmed the Italian. Talleyrand would “very soon return to the Church,” Spina wrote to Rome. Napoleon, however, had another agent at hand for this negotiation. He had retained the Breton priest, Bernier, at Paris, and now used him as a foil against the astute Italian. The Pope’s temporal possessions, the Legations, were the central difficulty in the negotiations that followed. Pius VII was pledged to work for their restoration; Napoleon had no intention whatever of restoring them. Talleyrand clearly stated this position, and then allowed the abbé and the archbishop to expend their diplomatic talent over the _impasse_ for a month or two. At last a draft of a Concordat was submitted to Rome, the First Consul sending with it the unexacting but precious present of the wooden statue of Our Lady of Loretto, which the revolutionary troops had brought from Italy, and telling his envoy to “treat the Pope as if he had 200,000 soldiers.” It was an original standard of spiritual respect.