In this Assembly Talleyrand himself made two proposals of an interesting character. The first was that the clergy should buy up the royal lottery, by making the King a “gratuitous gift” every year to cover the profits missed. His colleagues were not sufficiently moved by his eloquent denunciation of public gambling to make the sacrifice. Some of them, who knew the Abbé de Périgord’s own habits, may have even smiled. But Talleyrand’s aim was good, if not virtuous. He saw that the clergy were rapidly losing ground, and he felt that a sacrifice like this, in such a cause, would do much to redeem their degradation. The memoir to present to the King (and, of course, publish afterwards) “might have been superb,” he observes with a chuckle; he would have been very glad to write it. The other proposal he made was to raise the salaries of the lower clergy. On these fell the real work of maintaining religion in the country, yet the _curé_ had only 700 livres (less than thirty pounds) a year and his _vicaire_ the miserable sum of 350 livres. The episcopate was, like the army commissions, a preserve of the nobles, and a great gulf yawned between the two Orders. I calculate that the 140 bishops of France then drew about 8,000,000 francs a year from ecclesiastical sources alone; and as all were nobles, many of them had in addition huge private incomes and some State emoluments. Dillon had 160,000 a year from the Queen’s private purse for his amiability. They drove about Paris in gilded coaches, contributed to the opera, had opulent hotels and country palaces and hunting seats, and so on. The starving peasantry were beginning to rebel. At the Assembly of Notables the Archbishop of Aix spoke of tithe as “that voluntary offering from the piety of the faithful”; “as to which,” broke in the Duke de la Rochefoucauld, “there are now 40,000 cases on in the Courts.” The lower clergy, too, were forming associations for the betterment of their condition. The prelates heard this with pained surprise, but resisted Talleyrand’s motion. His earliest political efforts, as he said afterwards, failed because his proposals were too bold for his colleagues. But there can be no question as to the wisdom of his counsels. No one could at that time have had even the dimmest prevision of the events of 1789-1790—and so we may at once reject Pozzo di Borgo’s suggestion (afterwards) that Talleyrand from the first took the side of the weak and poor on subtle calculation—but Talleyrand’s view of the situation of the Church was singularly wise and shrewd, and his suggestions were, as we now very clearly see, wholly to its advantage. Nor can we with justice ignore the clear strain of humanity that is seen in the young abbé’s proposals in favour of the Breton widows (whom he had seen in their native home) and the lower clergy. In the latter instance he was even endangering his interest with the prelates.