I will only add, to complete Talleyrand’s environment about this time, that he had relations also with most of the retired statesmen of the day, Maurepas, Malesherbes, Choiseul and Turgot, and with the chief scientific workers, La Place, Condorcet, Lagrange, Monge, &c. Of this I will say more presently. Enough has been said to elucidate the progress of Talleyrand’s character up to the time of the Revolution. The work which I have to describe in the next chapter will prevent one from thinking that his time was wholly spent in pleasure or devoted to the task of social advancement. From 1780 onwards he was a most assiduous worker, and must have been an industrious student before that time. But he tasted, at least, every part of the life of Paris in those ten years at Bellechasse. I do not mean that he devoured all that it offered. He was an essentially temperate and refined man. He played for heavy stakes, as most people did; there were some 4,000 gambling houses at Paris when the Revolution began, to say nothing of salons, from that of the Queen at Marly downwards. But this is the only irregularity he admits; though, of course, the “Memoirs” are not “Confessions.” The Baron de Vars has compiled a work on _Les femmes de Talleyrand_. There is only one on the list, Mme. de Flahaut, besides the pretty actress of Saint-Sulpice and the lady he eventually married, with whom his name is connected by any show of evidence. At the same time it would be absurd to claim for him any prohibitive principles in such matters. He took a mind almost swept of ideals into a world where, one social writer says, you could count the families that were not stained with incest: where, at all events, almost every man, from princes and cardinals down to butchers and abbés, had a mistress. He was no hypocrite. The Church and the world alike expected too little of him for that. CHAPTER III PRIEST AND BISHOP Talleyrand had already spent two years of this kind of life when he was ordained priest. In a biographical inquiry it is only necessary to point out that the priesthood was required for his purpose. Possibly he thought of his parents, as some biographers suggest. However regrettable his life, he was a noble, and must not remain a minor cleric. In any case, he would see that the only entrance to the higher political world, along the path into which he had been forced, was the episcopate. He could not be expected to foresee the upheaval of 1789, which would make possible the rise of such men as Sieyès. In 1780 the General Assembly of the Clergy would meet again, and he had ground to believe that he would be appointed Agent-General. From this important position one usually passed to the episcopate. After such an experience as his had been he would very well leave it to the Church to settle its own credit in the matter.