On the fifth day the Pope’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Consalvi, was in Paris. He had left Rome placarded with the florid denunciations of the Pope by the emigrant bishops; he found Paris holding a congress of the constitutional bishops, who denounced the Concordat with equally lively rhetoric from their own point of view. The Pope was profoundly dejected and miserable; the First Consul was radiantly surveying the universe from the height of success; Talleyrand was wearying of the futile resistance of the Romans. Consalvi brought every weapon from the diplomatic arsenal of the Vatican. Thinking he understood Talleyrand, he said to him: “People make me out to be a pietist. I’m nothing of the kind. I like pleasure as well as anyone.” But Talleyrand did not admire Consalvi’s diplomacy. After a few days he sent him a final draft of a Concordat, and left Paris to take the waters at Bourbon l’Archambault. Mr. Holland Rose puts it that “the polite scoffer, the bitter foe of all clerical claims, found it desirable to take the baths at a distant place, and left the threads of the negotiation in the hands of two men who were equally determined to prevent its signature.” I have already pointed out that Talleyrand never scoffed at religion, and was not at all a foe, “bitter” or otherwise, of clerical claims of a non-political character. Further, Talleyrand left Paris, firstly, because it was his custom to go to the baths about this time, and secondly because he _wanted_ the Concordat signed without further palaver. As a fact, Consalvi expressed satisfaction that Talleyrand was out of the way at the moment of signing. Talleyrand, again, was bound to leave his functions in the charge of d’Hauterive, his second in command, and the belief that d’Hauterive was “equally determined to prevent signature” is an equally unjust inference from the mere fact of his being an ex-cleric. In fine, the story that the chiefs of the Foreign Office tried to trick Consalvi into signing a draft materially differing from the one they had given him, is only mentioned by Consalvi, and has been gravely questioned by some writers.[36]