that he distrusted sentimental promises and thought it advisable to have a formal motion passed. The remainder of August was taken up with the discussion of the form in which the Rights of Man should be declared. Talleyrand intervened once or twice with effect. It was he, supported by Mirabeau, who induced the Assembly to cut out the two Articles relating to religion and morals. He has been censured for this, but his speech is a quite honest plea for a purely secular and political declaration, without any antagonism to religion. Long afterwards we shall find him pleading eloquently for moral instruction and for lessons in religion in the schools. On the 18th he was appointed Secretary, and on the 27th spoke with great effect in support of a proposed loan. In the long and stormy debates of September on the subject of the royal Veto, in the course of which the distinction of Right and Left became fully pronounced, Talleyrand took no part. The life of the people’s Assembly must have jarred on his taste. A hundred deputies at once would spring to their feet and out-bawl each other, only the roar of a Mirabeau or a Maury being heard through the din. Gallery also joined in—encouraging, threatening, whistling and singing. How Talleyrand must have longed for his Upper House—and a seat in it! Through this chaotic period it was almost useless to have a constructive policy. His one preoccupation was, as Aimée de Coigny afterwards said, to assist in allaying violence and to see that as little blood as possible be shed. His moderate colleagues on the Constitution-Committee resigned, but he and Sieyès were appointed on the new committee, and he continued his effort to frame a constitutional check for the daily increasing violence. CHAPTER V THE BREACH WITH THE CHURCH When, in later years, Talleyrand looked back on the many oaths of allegiance he had successively sworn, he affirmed that he had never deserted any cause until it had abandoned itself. This is most certainly true of his desertion of the Royalist cause. His political ideal essentially and to the end included the element of limited monarchy; and his whole temper and taste would make him reluctant to turn from Versailles to the Paris of the end of 1789. A chaos, of which the issue was quite inconceivable, had succeeded to the older order. But the King and Queen had surrounded themselves with evil councillors from the first, and the throne was tottering. Talleyrand took no part in the long debates on the King’s Veto. The fact that the Assembly was discussing it at all meant, as he must have seen clearly, that a greater power than the King now ruled in France. He only can give or withhold an authority who possesses it.