Such was Talleyrand’s initiation to the inner life of the Church. Those who regret that, when he found himself forced even involuntarily into the ecclesiastical career, he did not endeavour to take a religious and self-sacrificing view of it, will do well to ponder these spectacles. Talleyrand’s course was natural. He used the influence of the president, who had a strong liking for him, to enter the gayer group of prelates. Dillon and de Brienne opened a few more of the Parisian salons to him. In the course of the sittings he had been made “promoteur” (a kind of sub-secretary, usually given a fair gratuity at the close), and was appointed to an unimportant committee on the voting counters and a very important one on religion and jurisdiction. He claims that he won some distinction in this Assembly, and was already marked for the high position of Agent-General of the Clergy. In September (1775—or eighteen months after Mme. du Barry has quitted the scene) we find a notice in the _Gazette_ that he has been appointed _abbé commendataire_ of the abbey of St. Denis at Rheims, which brought him an income of 18,000 livres a year. The diplomatic career thus began. The Pope confirmed the election of the sub-deacon _abbé_, and the prior took possession in Talleyrand’s name in December. As Chamfort put it, the ecclesiastical bachelor naturally looked to a wedding with some rich abbey to pay his debts. Bishops, Pope, and King acquiesced in the system without a murmur. All the bishops had sinecures of the sort, and the Court contrived to keep a few vacant at times and pocket the revenues. Talleyrand had not voluntarily entered the ecclesiastical world, and he was determined to make it serve his own ideal as far as possible. But one of his first acts was to pay off the debt his parents still owed to the Collège d’Harcourt. Before going to Rheims he had applied for admission into the Society of the Sorbonne and been accepted (after formal proof of his moral and intellectual qualities). He took up residence there after the close of the Assembly. With his abbatial income (more than £700 a year) and the prospect of scraps of political and administrative work, he could have at once begun an independent residence in Paris. But that would have left him in the ambiguous position of a cleric and celibate, cut off from the higher clerical distinctions and possibilities. He must now complete his ecclesiastical education in the usual way, and proceed by way of the Agency-General (to come in 1780) to the episcopate.